Gozzoli and the young Ghirlandaio

Gozzoli and the young Ghirlandaio

When Benozzo Gozzoli was painting the wall of the third king in the Medici Chapel between 1459-61, he painted himself for a second time in the procession. His face is above the figure of the falconer and behind a white horse.

Wrapped in a white and blue turban this time, he lifts up his right hand in an awkward position,
with the two middle fingers touching and the two outer fingers splayed apart with the thumb out.
Some art historians have said he is saying with this gesture that he is completing the work "with
his own hand," "da sua mano proprio," but I think the gesture is so specific that it must refer to something more than that. His self-portrait here looks just like his portrait right across the chapel from it, and I think he is

acknowledging the work he has finished up to this point, i.e., three walls completed, and two

more (the altar walls) to go. His serious expression denotes his conscientious undertaking of this project for the Medici family. He is letting them know that he takes his contract to heart and is bound to finish two more walls in the smaller room of the altar. His serious face is also warning the Medici to complete their side of the bargain, too, i.e., to remember to pay him.

He then does complete the side walls in the altar alcove of the chapel; they are the last to be

painted, probably between 1461 and 1463; he did some of the work himself, certainly the angels kneeling whose halos have the Latin of the Gloria written on them:

The angels stand or kneel or fly in the clouds above a landscape of trees, cypresses, duck ponds, villages, and villas.     Kneeling Pink angel on left side:

                                      Kneeling Angels on right side:

 

Closest to the altar and the back wall, behind the kneeling angels, are several curious angel figures who appear to be by a different painter. (These are not the angels who stand and sing the Gloria.) These angels gather roses and stems behind fences that have caught the rose bushes and held them. Upon closer inspection the angels behind the fences are using the roses to form into "ghirlande," garlands. These garlands are meant to decorate the altar where the Virgin kneels with her child and they are rose garlands because roses are the symbols of love, especially the love of the Virgin herself.

One of the angels on the left is accompanied by a peacock, the symbol of eternity, but both are engaged in the process of wrapping roses around a wire or wood frame to make pink rose garlands whose ends can be seen to be held up by other angels at the border of the back scene. See the yellow outlines of the garlands in these superimpositions:









Each of the gatherers has a set of colored wings, a gold foreshortened halo, and a flowing cape on top of the filmy angel dress. Two pick out the roses to be wound into the garlands, the others gather greens and roses into their gowns or assist in holding up the wound flowers. In the right side image, the angel in red holds up the frame to
which will be attached the gathered flowers.

For most viewers these particular angel figures at the back would be hardly noticeable, but they present so many similarities to figures painted later by another major painter, that we must point out the coincidences:

1) THE PEACOCK is in such a peculiar stance with tail spread out and head in profile, exactly as

the peacock appears in Domenico Ghirlandaio's painting of one in his 1480 Last Supper in Ognissanti.

 

 

Identical positions, identical underdrawing? 

2) ANGELS -Then two other angels also are repeated in Ghirlandaio frescoes later:

the angel in white with right hand lifted up is the figure of Abundance in Santa Maria Novella (1485-90):

 

and the angel in blue with roses held in the dress fabric reappears in Ghirlandaio's Salome in the Banquet of Herod in Santa Maria Novella (both step forward with left foot.)

 3) BLOCK ALTAR with sheep atop (painted above the door to the chapel) by Gozzoli is repeated painted above the Last Supper of Ghirlandaio's in 1473 in Badia a Passignano:

 

And if that were not enough connections between the two painters, watch what Ghirlandaio does

when he is asked to paint the Adoration of the Magi in the Life of Mary in his Santa Maria Novella

frescoes of 1485-90. Instead of camels in the procession in the upper right, he paints in the prominent animal

in Lorenzo dei Medici's zoo, the giraffe, with handlers who look much like those with the camels in Gozzoli's procession:

Could Domenico Ghirlandaio have been Gozzoli's assistant towards the end of the Medici Chapel

project? He is born Domenico Bigordi and Vasari claims he is trained by Baldovinetti, but as a fresco painter, he is making clear references to Gozzoli's work in his own, and his skill as a fresco painter could be explained by his having been trained by Gozzoli in Palazzo Medici-Riccardi. He is 13 by 1461, the age for a young apprentice. It could also explain why he received the nickname "Garland maker," not the reason Vasari gives in his second  edition of the Lives in 1568, that his father made silver garland jewellery for the heads of young women in Florence. His appellation would make more sense if he were the young apprentice responsible for painting the "Garland-makers" in the Gozzoli scenes near the altar. "Grillanda" is garland in Italian, and "Garland-maker" is Ghirlandaio. 

If he is the young painter not only of the garlands in the Medici Chapel but of the angels who are garland-makers, it would be reasonable to assume he was given the nickname of "GARLAND-MAKER," GHIRLANDAIO, by the artist in charge of the workshop or by the other apprentices in the workshop. This assumption would explain why several of the figures in this scene on both walls are transposed literally into later paintings by the master when he is in full command himself in the frescoes that gave him fame in Passignano and Santa Maria Novella in Florence. 

It would also explain why he paints in 1485 a self-portrait as a shepherd in the Nativity scene for Santa Trinita and points to a garland that looks just like the garlands in the Medici Chapel

frescoes, this time painted to look like a carved ancient garland on a sarcophagus just behind the

Christ Child.

He is pointing to his nickname, the name with which he became well-known as a painter; it is his way
of writing his signature, just as painting his self-portrait on the right is also a signature.

It might also explain why Ghirlandaio is offered the commission for the Santa Fina Chapel

in the Collegiata of San Gimignano in 1470, 

just as Gozzoli is finishing his fresco of Saint Sebastian in the same church.

The older master of the Medici Chapel helps his younger pupil to get work to help advance his career. He knows the "GARLAND-MAKER" will one day be a greater painter than himself. And, in fact, it is GHIRLANDAIO, not GOZZOLI, who, in 1482, is asked to go to Rome to paint the most important

commission of the day, some of the Vatican Sistine Chapel frescoes.

And it is Ghirlandaio's skill there that is then transferred to his pupil, Michelangelo, who finishes the Chapel with ceiling and altar wall frescoes that become more famous than any of his predecessors.

And isn't Michelangelo looking at Ghirlandaio's Cain and Abel in Passignano and reversing the

figures in his Creation of Adam?

The influence of one painter is passed down to another, who, in turn, passes it down to his more

famous pupil. Gozzoli's little "garland-maker" is taught well by his mentor and, he, in turn, teaches his own little "divine fresco-maker," "Il Divin Michelangelo," the terms of the trade.

Gozzoli's painted MEDICI ZOO

GOZZOLI's painted MEDICI ZOO

As we have described in another blog entry, Benozzo Gozzoli paints the Journey of the Magi
on the walls of the private family chapel in the Medici Palace in Florence in 1459-60. On the
walls are horsemen, the three Magi or Kings, portraits of friends of the family as well as family members, and something not mentioned in the first blog, ANIMALS, many, many animals, and birds.

Two scenes show shepherds with their sheep, oxen, dogs, and donkey, all appropriate for the scene
describing the Nativity of Christ in Luke:

 

On the wall of the Youngest King, a deer is being chased in a hunt:

while above that scene a rabbit peeks out of a protected warren and hopes the nearby dog does
not smell him (yellow arrows mine):

 Far from being a static landscape painted behind the scene of the procession, nature "red in tooth and claw" is on display, with a hawk flying after a pheasant in the sky above the middle-aged king,

a leopard attacking a bull near the oldest king,

another leopard running for a deer beyond those,

 

and a rabbit caught by a hawk and spilling its entrails close to the viewer at the bottom of the scene:

Not all of nature is vicious, but many of the wild animals seem just waiting to be let free, as the
leopard (paw-mark spots) being held by two ropes by the falconer in the same scene:

 or the cheetah, (single spots) on the horse with the page dressed in light blue:

or the monkey perching on a horse like a person at the edge to catch the viewer off-guard:

The ducks and the Bactrian camels (two humps) and dromedaries (one hump) all are placid in their

places, but they are foils to the violence occurring around them:

 

The artist has carried out his job of portraying the Medici family and allies intermingled in the

procession of an ancient story of important figures on their way to pay respects to a single child

who has just been born. But Gozzoli is absorbing more than what he has observed in the landscape

of Tuscany around him over the seasons; he is doing two things here:

1) he is recording some of the wild animals that the Medici owned as part of their private zoo,

exotic animals from far away, in competition with Marco Polo and his observations of the

wild animals of the East (see blog entry on Gozzoli and Marco Polo.) The cheetah, leopard, camel, monkey are all non-native species that speak of the enormous wealth of the Medici in their ability to procure animals from far-off lands.We know that when Lorenzo il Magnifico is older (1486), he is given a giraffe by the Sultan of Egypt to add to his collection of wild animals. The giraffe does not figure in Gozzoli's frescoes precisely because it was not part of the Medici zoo during this period, but the other animals could have been observed first-hand by Gozzoli. Most of the most exotic are depicted on one wall, that of the Oldest king, and it is as though Gozzoli wished to corral these creatures into a space together to form a zoo on the wall. In painting these creatures in the private chapel, he has documented for history the animals that formed part of the Medici zoo in the 15th century.

2)he is recording the violence of nature behind the human figures also as part of his own observations

of human nature and its potential for violence as well. Some of the human faces are far from happy

and the allies the Medici count as friends are perhaps less adoring and loyal than they think:

Sigismondo Malatesta, for instance, looks daggers at his hosts, as though not wanting to be part of

their political parade:

In the group of men behind the second portrait of Gozzoli on the oldest king's wall, the "zoo" wall,

some of the Florentine "friends" seem to gather together to conspire; they seem to whisper to each other as they look across the wall at the members of the Medici family.

We know that eighteen years after the frescoes were painted, a conspiracy was gathered just this way. In 1478 the Pazzi "friends" decided to try to assassinate Lorenzo the Magnificent and his brother; they only succeeded in killing Giuliano in the Duomo during Easter Sunday mass, Lorenzo escaped, but the violence which then ensued in the chase after the conspirators led all the way to Constantinople, where the last of them was caught and brought back. Most were hung and quartered in vicious ways, bodies dragged through the streets of Florence and put on display on the walls of the Bargello. So the undercurrent of violence in human society is hinted at by Gozzoli in his portrayal of nature as competition for survival.