Domenico di Tommaso Bigordi called Domenico Ghirlandaio (1449 Florence – 1494 Florence) was one of the most popular Florentine artists of his time. His father, Tommaso di Curradi Bigordi, had a business with jewellery, and Domenico started as a goldsmith. His nickname of Ghirlandaio, i. e. the "Garland-maker", came from his speciality, namely, the manufacture of silver or gold crowns or diadems, popular with young women of Florence.
In
the 1460s thanks to the patronage of the Vespucci family, Ghirlandaio started
to work independently. For his patrons he produced various works in the
church of Ognissanti, Florence, including The Last Supper
fresco in the refectory of Ognissanti painted in 1480.
In 1475 he worked in San Gimignano; he painted the frescos of The
Life of St. Fina in the Collegiate Church, which were still
archaic in their style. But already in his Roman works in 1481-82 for the
Sistine Chapel he showed himself as a watchful artist with a tranquil and
even temperament, capable of organizing complicated compositions with many
well arranged figures. He worked together with Botticelli,
Perugino
and Rosselli and painted two frescos The
Calling of St. Peter and The Resurrection (now
destroyed).
The prestige of this job led to many commissions on his return to Florence
including the decoration of the Sala dei Gigli in Palazzo Vecchio (1483),
frescos and an altarpiece for the Sassetti Chapel in Santa Trinità
(1483-1485). Ghirlandaio decorated with 6 frescos the private chapel of
the Sassetti family with the Scenes from
the Life of St. Francis, the patron saint of the banker Francesco
Sassetti, who commissioned the work.
The decoration of the Sassetti Chapel consisted not just of the cycle of
frescos, but also of an altarpiece showing the Adoration
of the Shepherds. Some details, such as figure arrangements,
point to a Dutch influence, namely to Hugo
van der Goes, whose Portinari Altar Ghirlandaio highly admired.
In the late 1480s, Ghirlandaio painted a number of interesting portraits,
the most remarkable of which is Old Man
with a Young Boy. This panel occupies a special position in
Florentine portraiture of the Early Renaissance. Never before in the name
of realism had such careful attention been paid to ugly, even disfiguring
detail.
The
Last Supper fresco in the refectory of Ognissanti painted in
1480, a subject he used again in San Marco, was important in the way Ghirlandaio
succeeded in bringing actual architecture into the scene. His creativity
reached its culmination with his work in the Tornabuoni Chapel of Santa
Maria Novella (1485-1490). The work was commissioned by Giovanni Tornabuoni,
a partner in the Medici bank. The fifteen frescoes of the Life of
St. John the Baptist and the Life
of the Virgin, which adorn the Tornabuoni chapel, are rightfully
numbered among the most celebrated in Florence. They are Ghirlandaio's
most popular work, and are reckoned among the greatest Italian masterpieces.
This last work was finished in 1490 by his large and busy studio, which
he managed together with his brothers David and Benedetto, and which had
a lot of pupils, counting Michelangelo
among them.
About 1480, Ghirlandaio
married Costanza di Bartolommeo Nucci (d. 1485). From her he had two sons,
Bartolommeo, born in 1481, who entered the Camaldolese Order; and Ridolfo
(1483-1561), who was, like his father, a painter and a friend of Raphael.
In 1488, the artist took Antonia di ser Paolo di Simone Paoli as his second
wife. He died, almost suddenly, of a malignant fever, at the age of forty-five
years.
Bibliography:
Early Renaissance in Italian Art. by V. Lazarev. Moscow. 1979.
The Art of the Italian Renaissance. Architecture. Sculpture. Painting.
Drawing. Könemann. 1995.
Painting of Europe. XIII-XX centuries. Encyclopedic Dictionary.
Moscow. Iskusstvo. 1999.
Domenico
Ghirlandaio: Artist and Artisan by Jean K. Cadogan. Yale Univ
Pr, 2001.