GOZZOLI and MARCO POLO

GOZZOLI and MARCO POLO

It might seem on the surface that Benozzo Gozzoli, the painter of frescoes in a Christian chapel for the Medici in 1459-60, might have little to do with the Venetian traveller, Marco Polo (1254-1324,) who made his famous trip to the Orient between 1271 and 1295. A deeper look at Polo's written view of the East and Gozzoli's procession of kings from the East reveals that, in some interesting aspects, the painter's Journey of the Magi in Florence has specific debts to the written and visual accounts of Marco Polo's Journey from the earlier century. While Gozzoli himself may not have read the entire text of Polo's story, he is influenced enough by Medici advisers on the frescoes who have read one of the many versions of Marco's account, that parallels are evident. (For this analysis I rely on Laurence Bergreen's fascinating book, Marco Polo, from Venice to Xanadu, (New York, Vintage, 2008,) even though Bergreen does not mention Gozzoli in his account.
       The first manuscript with Polo's story is written in French by a man named Rustichello da Pisa, who puts down what Marco Polo dictates to him between 1298 and 1299 when Polo is a prisoner-of-war in a Genoese jail after his return from China. That manuscript is now lost.(page 328) The story, however, is published in manuscript form in 1300, also in French, in a later edition of one of Christine de Pisane's books in the 14th century, after which it is  translated into Latin, and receives its first printed version in Italian in 1477. Its first Tuscan version circulated while Marco was still alive and manuscripts in Italian were available in 1445 and 1446. (page 347) It would have certainly been known in manuscript form in the 15th century by the Medici, who collected rare books of this sort for their library. In fact, one such manuscript of Marco Polo's Livre des Merveilles was written and illuminated in 1375, with illustrations that included camels, seen here below: (more on the camels later.)

Of course parts of the story could have been retold as part of the oral lore about the East in Benozzo
Gozzoli's Florence without reliance on text.
         But here are some of the visual clues Gozzoli paints that show Marco Polo to be a
source for his Journey.
         1) THE HAWK CHASING THE PHEASANT
On the back wall of the chapel in the sky above the middle-aged King, a hawk is flying after a
pheasant with intent to kill.

In Marco Polo's description of the Mongol lands he traverses before reaching Kublai Khan, he mentions that certain people in that region tell of having seen "a young female hawk catch and eat a black pheasant." Later in his own experience in China, Marco witnesses a hawk trained to kill other animals. (pg.95) While it is certainly true that Gozzoli might have seen a similar incident out in the
Tuscan countryside himself, the fact that he gives quite a lot of space to this scene on a wall next to
the wall with all the exotic animals, suggests that he is mimicking the earlier Journey.

It must be noted that a visual precedent for this scene exists in a previous Journey of the Magi painted on a single altarpiece painted for the Strozzi family in Florence by Gentile da Fabriano in 1423; Gentile follows more closely Marco's detail of the chased bird being black, but his bird looks less like a real pheasant than Gozzoli's bird. And Gozzoli's bird, while not black, is darker than the hawk.  Both painters retell Marco Polo's story in different ways; da Fabriano is limited in space so the hawk is right up on the bird, but Gozzoli has more space to use, so the pheasant has a fighting chance in the hawk's chase.

2) WILD ANIMAL HUNTS JUXTAPOSED with MEN
In Marco's description of a noble Mongol mother lambasting her sons for always fighting among

themselves, he says that she compares them to feral animals, a wild dog, a panther attacking on a

mountain, a gerfalcon, camels biting. These kinds of animals appear in Gozzoli's painting, 

dog in hunt:

leopard (type of panther) attacking on a mountain,

 gerfalcon with the rabbit,

and camels, though not biting.

The similar choices of animals in the wild echo the same theme in Marco Polo's story, which is about a comparison of men and wild animals. Gozzoli places the animals in among the men in his procession to hint about the wild animal nature of men, with both intent on survival.

       3) THE LUSH LANDSCAPES of trees, rivers, hills, valleys as the Gozzoli Magi make their trip
are similar to the descriptions in parts of Marco's journey. Certainly some manuscript pages that illustrate Polo's text often look like the rocky but lush landscapes of Gozzoli's journey. Here is a page from the 1410-12 French manuscript 2810 in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris of Marco Polo's story:

The way Gozzoli handles the rocks in the landscape is very similar to the rocks in the French manuscript page.

4) THE HUNTS OF THE FALCONERS - Marco Polo describes the falconers of Kublai Khan who set their falcons on prey.(p. 163) In the procession painted by Gozzoli on the wall of the Oldest King,
a falconer has let his hawk loose to prey on a rabbit which it consumes to the left of the
falconer.

 

 5) USING ANIMALS TO HUNT OTHER ANIMALS
Kublai Khan, according to Marco Polo, liked to hunt "stags, buck, and roe-deer" among other animals, and he used  "leopards and lynxes all trained to beast catching...and very good at the chase."(p. 162)
In Gozzoli's painted chapel, the leopard on the leash of the falconer above will probably be used in this fashion, and the artist illustrates the same kind of hunts with two other leopards on the same wall; in one scene in the landscape the leopard attacks a bull and appears to be bringing it down; in another a leopard is chasing a deer:

         6) THE CAMELS in the illustrations of the 1375 manuscript of Polo's visit are set directly next to each other in a row, mimicking the movement of camels over the terrain with the repetition
and overlapping of the heads of the camels. The same overlapping of the camels and the same camel
shapes for the heads of the camels occurs in the Journey of the Magi on the wall of the Oldest King.
                                                                                   Catalan Alas, 1375, Marco Polo's Journey.

Similar hats are worn by the camel drivers in Gozzoli's painting, too (yellow arrows mine.)

        The Journey of the Magi as told in Luke marks the beginning of the Christian story, as the Three Kings arrived from the East to give gifts to a child whom they had heard was prophesized to become a King. The aim and end of the Journey in the Gozzoli's Chapel is the altarpiece depicting Mary adoring the Child, the beginning of Christ's life.  While it might seem odd for the Medici and Gozzoli to rely on an Italian writer who travelled to lands where Buddha and other idols were the deities worshipped, it is completely understandable when we realize that Gozzoli was being called upon to paint scenes of foreigners with Eastern dress and headdresses travelling over some lands unknown to the average Florentine with animals of exotic origin. Marco Polo's written account as well as the illustrations of his journey in manuscripts painted before Gozzoli's frescoes furnished some of the material for the description of Gozzoli's Magi Journey.