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Cosimo, as we shall see when we reach S. Marco, invited Fra Angelico to paint upon the walls of that convent sweet and simple frescoes to the glory of God. Piero employed Fra Angelico's pupil, Benozzo Gozzoli to decorate this chapel.
And to this school of the three carved roses in the Square of Purgatory belong, among others, Angelico, Benozzo, Botticelli, and all those Venetians who painted piping shepherds, and ruralising magnificent ladies absorbed in day-dreams. But besides this kind of imagination in art, there is another and totally different.
If the frescos of Orgagna, and of Benozzo Gozzoli in the Campo Santo at Pisa, were in as good condition, it would be much more satisfactory. These pictures of Spinello are drawn with much boldness and energy, but it is not the fortunate audacity of Orgagna.
The great humanists of his time, Leonardo Bruni, Carlo Marsuppini, Poggio and Niccolò de' Niccoli were his companions, and in his palace in Via Larga, and in his villas at Careggi and Poggio a Caiano, he gathered the most precious treasures, rare manuscripts, and books, not a few antique marbles and jewels, coins and medals and statues, while he filled the courts and rooms, built and decorated by the greatest artists of his time, with the statues of Donatello, the pictures of Paolo Uccello, Andrea del Castagno, Fra Filippo Lippo, and Benozzo Gozzoli.
The innumerable artists of the Renaissance remained in hesitation; tried to court both the antique and the modern, to unite the Pagan and the Christian some, like Ghirlandajo, in cold indifference to all but mere artistic science, encrusting marble bacchanals into the walls of the Virgin's paternal house, bringing together, unthinkingly, antique-draped women carrying baskets, and noble Strozzi and Ruccellai ladies with gloved hands folded over their gold brocaded skirts; others, with cheerful and childlike pleasure in both antique and modern, like Benozzo, crowding together half-naked youths and nymphs treading the grapes and scaling the trellise with Florentine magnificos in plaited skirts and starched collars, among the pines, and porticos, the sprawling children, barking dogs, peacocks sunning themselves, and partridges picking up grain, of his Pisan frescoes; yet others using the antique as mere pageant shows, allegorical mummeries, destined to amuse some Duke of Ferrara or Marquis of Mantua, together with the hurdle races of Jews, hags, and riderless donkeys.
Among the best examples of his work are scenes from the life of St John the Baptist in frescoes in the choir of the Duomo at Prato. His panel pictures are rather numerous. There are two lunette pictures by Fra Filippo in the National Gallery. Benozzo Gozzoli, 1424-1496, a scholar of Fra Angelico, but resembling him only in light and cheerful colouring.
In Germany it may be seen in the very bunglers among painters; in Italy, setting aside Angelico, whose works reveal his saintly spirit and are the coloured image of his secret soul, and his pupil, Benozzo Gozzoli, the last of the Mediæval painters; if we also except his precursors: Cimabue, the survivors of the rigid Byzantines, Giotto who thawed those fixed and puzzling figures, Orcagna, Simone di Martino, Taddeo Gaddi all the very early painters how much dexterous trickery do we find among the great painters, mimicking the religious note, and producing a deceptive imitation by sheer sham.
From which two principles it necessarily results that he will begin at the upper left, and end at the lower right-hand corner. I have skipped lightly, I admit, over a considerable interval between primitive man and Benozzo Gozzoli.
The angels of Giotti, of Benozzo, of Fiesole, are, if not female, feminine; those of Filippo Lippi and of Andrea, masculine; but you cannot say of those of Raphael, that they are masculine or feminine. The idea of sex is wholly lost in the blending of power, intelligence, and grace.
In the Church of S. Brancazio, also, he made a tomb of marble for Messer Benozzo Federighi, Bishop of Fiesole, and Federighi himself lying on it, portrayed from nature, with three other half-length figures; and in the ornament of the pilasters of this work, on the level surface, he painted certain festoons with clusters of fruit and foliage, so lifelike and natural, that nothing better could be done in oil and on panel with the brush.
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