Year: Day to Day Men: January 11

The Stucco Effect

The eleventh day of January in 1494 marks the death of Italian Renaissance painter Domenico Ghirlandaio from pestilential fever at the age of forty-five. 

Born in June of 1448 in Florence, Domenico di Tommaso Curradi di Doffo Bigodi was part of the third generation of Florence Renaissance painters among whom were Sandro Botticelli, Andrea de Verracchio, and the Pollaiolo brothers, Antonio, Piero and Simone. Bigodi was known professionally by the name Domenico Ghirlandaio.

Domenico Ghirlandaio received his initial training as an apprentice in his goldsmith father’s workshop where he often made portraits of the shop’s visitors. Ghirlandaio was later apprenticed to painter Alesso Baldovinetti for training in painting and mosaic work. In Florence, he was apprenticed at the workshop of sculptor and painter Andrea de Verracchio and maintained close associations with both Boticelli and the Umbrian school painter Pietro Perugino, who became the teacher of painter and architect Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino, known as Raphael. 

Ghirlandaio is predominantly known for his fresco work in which he excelled and a number of important works executed in tempera. Among his fresco works are two depicting the miraculous events at the death of Saint Fina for the city of San Gimignano’s Chapel of Santa Fina; “St. Jerome in His Study”, a companion piece to Botticelli’s “Saint Augustine in His Study” in Florence’s Church of Ognissanti; and several frescoes depicting popes and Biblical scenes at the Palazzo Vecchio. 

In 1481, Domenico Ghirlandaio was summoned to Rome by Pope Sixtus IV as part of a team of Umbrian and Florentine painters to create a series of frescoes on the walls of the Sistine Chapel. The foremost of his work there was “The Vocation of the Apostles” that depicts the Gospel narrative of Jesus calling Peter and Andrew to become his disciples. Between 1482 and 1485, Ghirlandaio painted a fresco cycle for the Sassetti Chapel  of Santa Trinita that was commissioned by Medici banker Francesco Sassetti and Giovanni Tornabuoni, who later became Ghirlandaio’s patron. 

In 1485, Ghirlandaio painted “Adoration of the Shepherds” for the Sassetti Chapel’s altarpiece. Ghirlandaio worked on the Santa Maria Novella, the family chapel of the Ricci family, from 1485 to 1490. For the family, he produced frescoes depicting the lives of the Virgin Mary and St. John the Baptist. In addition to this fresco cycle, he painted no fewer than twenty-one portraits of the Tornabuoni and Tornaquinci families, who provided the finances for the chapel’s restoration.

Domenico Ghirlandaio had a large workshop which included his two brothers, Davide and Benedetto, his brother-in-law Bastiano Mainardi, and later his son Ridolfo, who also became a painter. He had many apprentices over the years, among whom was Michelangelo. Although Ghirlandaio had a long line of descendants, the family name died out in the seventeenth century, when its last members entered monasteries.