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Updated: June 14, 2025
'It is a Madonna, she said, lowering her voice. 'A stiff old-fashioned one, in beautiful, bright, clear colouring. The Child is reaching out to embrace a little cross, and his Mother holds him towards it with such a sad but such a holy face, as if she foreboded all, and was ready to bear it. 'Ah! that Ghirlandajo? 'That is the name! cried Violet, enchanted. 'Have you seen it? 'I saw Lord St.
Well, it is in much the same way that Ghirlandajo has painted here in the choir of S. Maria Novella. He has seen the fashions, he has noted the pretty faces of the women, he has watched the naïve homely life of the Medici ladies, for instance, and has painted not his dreams about Madonna, but his dreams of Vanna Tornabuoni, of Clarice de' Medici, and the rest.
Passing out of the SS. Annunziata into S. Maria degli Innocenti, we come to a beautiful picture by Domenico Ghirlandajo in the great altarpiece, the Adoration of the Magi, painted in 1488. Though scarcely so lovely as the Adoration of the Shepherds in the Accademia, perhaps spoiled a little by over cleaning and restoration, it is one of the most simple and serene pictures in Florence.
Whilst Michelangelo as a youth was drawing from the cartoons of the Sassetti chapel in the school of Domenico Ghirlandajo, Cosimo Roselli was just receiving as a pupil a boy only a little behind him in genius.
In a word, they take the place of frescoes. The pleasure of touching a mobile fabric is lost. A fold in such a dainty piece would break its beauty. Almost must a woven panel of our day fit the panel it fills as exactly as the wood-work of a room fits its dimensions. The Nineteenth Century at the Gobelins was finished by mistakenly copying Ghirlandajo, Correggio, others of their time.
In equity, we acknowledge that Lodovico's record on the ledger of the Ghirlandajo brothers proves their willingness to take him as a prentice, and their payment to him of two florins in advance; but the same record does not disprove Condivi's statement, derived from his old master's reminiscences, to the effect that Domenico Ghirlandajo was in no way greatly serviceable to him as an instructor.
After them, indeed, their successors were enabled to attain to it through seeing excavated out of the earth certain antiquities cited by Pliny as amongst the most famous, such as the Laocoon, the Hercules, the Great Torso of the Belvedere, and likewise the Venus, the Cleopatra, the Apollo, and an endless number of others, which, both with their sweetness and their severity, with their fleshy roundness copied from the greatest beauties of nature, and with certain attitudes which involve no distortion of the whole figure but only a movement of certain parts, and are revealed with a most perfect grace, brought about the disappearance of a certain dryness, hardness, and sharpness of manner, which had been left to our art by the excessive study of Piero della Francesca, Lazzaro Vasari, Alesso Baldovinetti, Andrea dal Castagno, Pesello, Ercole Ferrarese, Giovanni Bellini, Cosimo Rosselli, the Abbot of S. Clemente, Domenico del Ghirlandajo, Sandro Botticelli, Andrea Mantegna, Filippo, and Luca Signorelli.
Without being one of the greatest of the Italian masters Ghirlandajo was a very important painter. He was also a teacher of the great Michael Angelo. Some good painters worked in Venice from the last half of the fourteenth century; but I shall begin to speak of the Venetian school with some account of the Bellini. The sketch-book of the father is one of the treasures of the British Museum.
At one time he corrected a drawing of his master's: when he saw this, sixty years later, he said, "I almost think that I knew more of art in my youth than I do in my old age." When Michael Angelo went to Ghirlandajo, that master was employed on the restoration of the choir of Santa Maria Novella, so that the boy came at once into the midst of important work.
One of the reasons that Ghirlandajo is famous is that he often chose well known personages for his models, and as he painted just what he saw, did not idealise his subject, he gave to the world amazing portraits, as well as fine paintings. The same thing was done by painters of a far different school, at another period.
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