Painter, born in Florence, NC Italy. He was apprenticed to a goldsmith, a metal garland-maker or ghirlandaio. His main works were frescoes, in his native city, notably a series illustrating the lives of the Virgin and the Baptist in the choir of Santa Maria Novella (1490).
Domenico Ghirlandaio (1449 - January 11, 1494) was a Florentine Renaissance painter, a contemporary of Botticelli and Filippino Lippi.
His full name is given as Domenico di Tommaso Curradi di Doffo Bigordi; The nickname "Il Ghirlandaio" (garland-maker) came to Domenico from his father, a goldsmith who was renowned for creating the metallic garland-like necklaces worn by Florentine women. In his father's shop, Domenico is said to have made portraits of the passers-by, and he was eventually apprenticed to Alessio Baldovinetti to study painting and mosaic.
First works in Florence and Rome
In 1480, Ghirlandaio painted the Saint Jerome and other frescoes in the church of the Ognissanti, Florence, and a life-sized Last Supper in its refectory. He also painted the Apotheosis of St. Zenobius, an over-life-sized work with an elaborate architectural framework, figures of Roman heroes, and other sexual details, striking in its perspective and structural/compositional skill.
In 1483, Ghirlandaio was summoned to Rome by Pope Sixtus IV to paint a wall fresco in the Sistine Chapel: Christ calling Peter and Andrew to their Apostleship.
Later Works in Tuscany
Back in Florence in 1485, Ghirlandaio painted fresco cycles in the Sassetti chapel of S. Trinita for the donor and banker Francesco Sassetti, who became manager of the branch of the Medici bank in Genoa, only to be replaced by Giovanni Tornabuoni -- Ghirlandaio's future patron. In the chapel, Domenico painted six scenes from the life of St Francis, including St Francis obtaining from Pope Honorius the Approval of the Rules of his Order; The altarpiece from the Sassetti chapel, the Adoration of the Shepherds, is now in the Florentine Academy.
Immediately after this commission, Ghirlandaio was asked to renew the frescoes in the choir of S. Maria Novella, which formed the chapel of the Ricci family, but the Tornabuoni and Tornaquinci families, then much more prominent than the Ricci, undertook the cost of the restoration, with conditions; The frescoes, by Domenico and many assistants, were painted in four courses along the three walls, the main subjects being the lives of the Madonna and of the Baptist. These works are particularly interesting in that they include many historical portraits, a genre in which Ghirlandaio was preeminently skilled.
In this cycle, there are no fewer than twenty-one portraits of the Tornabuoni and Tornaquinci families: in the Angel appearing to Zacharias, portraits of Politian, Marsilio Ficino, and others; in the Expulsion of Joachim from the Temple, Mainardi and Baldovinetti (or the latter figure may, perhaps, be Ghirlandaio's father). the painted window was from Domenico's own design.
Other distinguished works from Ghirlandaio's hand are an altarpiece in tempera of the Virgin Adored by Sts Zenobius, Justus and others, painted for the church of St Justus, but now in the Uffizi gallery, a remarkable masterpiece; Ghirlandaio did not often attempt the nude; one of his pictures including nudes, Vulcan and his Assistants forging Thunderbolts, was painted for Lo Spedaletto, but (like several others specified by Vasari), no longer exists.
Critical assessment and legacy
Ghirlandaio's compositional schema were simultaneously grand and decorous, in keeping with the 15th-century's restrained and classicizing experimentation.
A certain hardness of outline may attest to his early training in metal work. Vasari says that Ghirlandaio was the first to abandon, in great part, the use of gilding in his pictures, representing by genuine painting any objects supposed to be gilded;
One of the great legacies of Ghirlandaio is that he gave some early art education to Michelangelo, who cannot, however, have remained with him long.
Ghirlandaio died of "pestilential fever" on the 11th of January 1494 and was buried in S.
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