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Fenwick was like one of Ghirlandajo's tall women in Santa Maria Novella. Phoebe had sometimes listened uncomfortably to these comparisons. She was a Cumberland girl, and had no wish at all to be like people in Italy. It seemed somehow to cut her off from her own folk. 'John is late! said a voice beside her. An elderly woman had stepped out of the cottage porch.
You know, most probably, already, that the frescos on each side of you are Ghirlandajo's. You have been told they are very fine, and if you know anything of painting, you know the portraits in them are so. Nevertheless, somehow, you don't really enjoy these frescos, nor come often here, do you?
Domenico began as a worker in mosaic, a maker of pictures or designs with many coloured pieces of glass or stone. Ghirlandajo's art was no improvement on that of his teacher, but he in turn became the teacher of Michael Angelo. The Florentine school of painting, to which Ghirlandajo belonged, was not so famous for colour as the Venetian school, but it had many other elements to commend it.
I see her in Ghirlandajo's garden, pacing, still-eyed, calm and cold, with Ginevra de' Benci and Giovanna of the Albizzi, those quiet streets on a visit to the mother of John Baptist. Mariota, the hardy wife of the metal-smith, is not for one of your quality, though the wench is well enough now with her baby on her arm and the best of her seen by a poet and made enduring.
It was before Ghirlandajo's time that another painter had discovered the use of oil in mixing paints. Previously colours had been mixed in water with some gelatinous substance, such as the white and yolk of an egg, to give the paint a proper texture or consistency. This preparation was called "distemper," and frescoes were made by using this upon plaster while it was still wet.
Those frescoes of Ghirlandajo's with real Florentine faces and figures in them, and all lavished upon the eternal twilight of that choir but I suppose that if the full day were let in on them, once, they would vanish like ghosts at cock-crow! You must be sure to see the Spanish chapel; and the old cloister itself is such a pathetic place.
Lodovico perceived at length that it was useless to oppose his son's natural bent. Accordingly, he sent him into Ghirlandajo's workshop. A minute from Ghirlandajo's ledger, under the date 1488, gives information regarding the terms of the apprenticeship. It seems that Michelangelo retained no very pleasant memory of his sojourn with the Ghirlandajo brothers.
For, believe it or not, of that kind were Delia Robbia's enrichments, Ghirlandajo's frescos, Raphael's Madonnas, and Alberti's broad marble churches: of that kind and of no other; on a level with the painted lady smiling out of a painted window at Airolo, whose frozen lips assure the traverser of the Saint Gothard that he has passed the ridge and may soon smell the olives.
To-day there is but little worth seeing in this seventeenth-century church, a St. Augustine by Botticelli, a St. Jerome and two large frescoes by Domenico Ghirlandajo, but in the old refectory of the convent, which has now become a barracks, is Domenico Ghirlandajo's fresco of the Last Supper.
The same is true about his pulpit in S. Croce at Florence, his treatment of the story of S. Savino at Faenza, and his "Annunciation" in the church of Monte Oliveto at Naples. Benedetto, indeed, may be said to illustrate the working of Ghiberti's influence by his liberal use of landscape and architectural backgrounds; but the style is rather Ghirlandajo's than Ghiberti's.
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