(Florence 1449 – 1494)

Domenico di Tommaso Bigorsi, who was known as Ghirlandaio, was the most important Italian painter of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. According to Vasari, after being apprentice of his father, he studied painting with A. Baldovinetti.

We have to stress the frescoes on the Vespucci chapel in the church of Ognissanti in Florence among his first important artworks. In these frescoes, we find a Madonna della Misericordia which could be painted in 1472, the same year the chapel was founded. The frescoes at both sides in St. Fina’s Chapel (1475) in the Collegiata di san Gimignano represent the maturity of Ghirlandaio. Verrochio’s influence can be appreciated in the frescoes Ghirlandaio painted in the Church of the Brozzi.

In 1481 he was summoned to Rome by Pope Sixtus IV. There, he painted Christ calling Peter and Andrew to their Apostleship in the Sistine Chapel. He went back to Florence where he began to paint several compositions on sacred subjects, which later were useful for him to paint a gallery of important figures of that period. Some of these artworks were Life of St. Francis (1483 – 1486), now in the Sasseti Chapel of Santa Trinita and Life of St. John the Baptist, in Santa Maria Novella. Other important works painted by Ghirlandaio are Adoration of the Magi and Visitation. His art is characterized by both a precise realism and a brilliant colour as well as by his tendency to profane religious scenes.