Florence: S. Maria Novella

 

On his tour of Florence’s S. Maria Novella, Edward Hutton admired Leon Alberti’s façade, “one of the most beautiful in the world,” and the Rucellai chapel with its famed image of the Madonna, but I particularly liked his description of the frescoes of Domenico Ghirlandajo.

 

If Florence built the Baptistery, the Duomo, and the Campanile for the glory of the whole city, that there might be one place, in spite of all the factions, where without difference all might enter the kingdom of heaven… she built other churches too, more particular in their usefulness, less splendid in their beauty, but not less necessary in their hold on the life of the city, or their appeal to us to-day. … In the desolate but beautiful  Piazza of S. Maria Novella, at the gates of the old city, you find a Dominican convent, and before it the great church of that Order, S. Maria Novella herself, the bride of Michelangelo. …(219)

Ghirlandajo: Birth of Mary

But it is in the choir behind the high altar…that we come upon the simple serious work of Domenico Ghirlandajo, whom all the critics have scorned. Born in 1449, the pupil of Alessio Baldovinetti, Ghirlandajo is not a great painter perhaps, but rather a craftsman, a craftsman with a wonderful power of observation, of noting truly the life of his time. He seems to have asked of art rather truth than beauty. Almost wholly, perhaps, without the temperament of the artist, his success lies in his gift for expressing not beauty but the life of his time, the fifteenth century in Florence, which lives still in all his work….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. And he was right; almost without exception his frescoes are the most interesting and living work left in Florence. He has understood or divined  that one cannot represent exactly that which no longer exists; and it is to represent something with exactitude that he is at work. So he contents himself very happily with painting the very soul of his century. It is a true and sincere art this realistic, unimpassioned, impersonal work of Ghirlandajo’s, and in its result, for us at any rate, it has a certain largeness and splendour. Consider this “Birth of the Virgin.” It is full of life and homely observation. You see the tidy dusted room where St. Anne is lying on the bed, already, as in truth she was, past her youth, but another painter would have forgotten it. She is just a careful Florentine housewife, thrifty too, not flurried by her illness, for she has placed by her bedside, all ready for her need, two pomegranates and some water. Then, again, they are going to wash the little Mary. She lies quite happily sucking her fingers in the arms of her nurse, the basin is in the middle of the floor, a servant has just come in briskly, no doubt as St. Anne has always insisted, and pours the water quickly into the vessel. It is not difficult to find all sorts of faults, of course, as the critics have not hesitated to do….the lady in the foreground, how unmoved she seems; it is as though the whole scene has been arranged for the sake of her portrait; and indeed, it is a portrait, for the richly dressed visitor is Ginevra de’ Benci*, who stands too in the fresco of the Birth of St. John. Again in the fresco of the angel appearing to Zacharias in the Temple, there are some thirty portraits of famous Florentines, painted with much patience, and no doubt with an extraordinary truth of likeness. (224-226)

 

Ghirlandajo: Birth of St. John

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*Note: Here is Leonardo's portrait of Ginevra de' Benci.

 

 

Edward Hutton: Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa, second edition, London, 1908.