The Wonder Of The Renaissance

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

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There is no one person in whom the spirit of Renaissance—that is to say, the rebirth of ancient art and learning—is so completely summed up and expressed as in Leonardo da Vinci. Yet ‘The Martyrdom of St.Sebastian,’ by the brothers Antonio and Piero del Pollaiuolo agains shows something quite modern in its feeling and expression. These two Florentines were contemporaries of Leonardo. Antonio (1432-98) was of humble origin. His father, who is as his surname shows, was a poulterer, apprenticed the boy to a goldsmith, with whom he soon made a reputation as the most skillful workman in the shop. In time he was able to open a shop of his own, and his reliefs and wax models were much admired by sculptors as well as by his patrons. Meanwhile his younger brother Piero, eleven years his junior, had been apprenticed to a painter, and in early middle age Antonio thought he would like to become a painter also. He had educated himself, learning all he could of anatomy and perspective; and found no difficulty in the drawing, but the coloring was so different from anything he had done before that at first he despaired of success; but firm in his resolve he put himself under his younger brother, and in a few months became an excellent painter.

Of all works painted by the two brothers the most famous is ‘The Martyrdom of St. Sebastian,’ now in the National Gallery.

The manysidedness, so characteristic of the artists of the Renaissance, which we have already found in Leonardo and Antonio Pollaiuolo, also distinguishes one of the most interesting of their contemporaries. Domenico Ghirlandaio (1449-94), who also was originally a goldsmith, owes his very name to a freak of fashion. He was the first to invent and make fashionable the head ornament worn by Florentine girls. Hence he became known as Ghirlandaio (the maker of garlands), not only because he was the original inventor but also we hear, because his were of such exceeding beauty that every girl wanted a garland from his shop.

Discontented with his trade, which gave comparatively small scope to his genius for design. Domenico began painting portraits of the people who came to his shop. These were so lifelike and so beautifully painted, that the fame of the artist soon spread, and he was inundated with orders for portraits, altar-pieces, and decorations for the palaces of noblemen. Pope Sixtus IV heard about him and sent to Florence, inviting him to come to Rome and join the band of famous artists who were already at work on what is now known as the Sistine Chapel.

His great work, ‘The Call of SS. Peter and Andrew,’ in the Sistine Chapel is a splendid example of the boldness of composition which he contributed to art; but his small painting at the Louvre, ‘Portrait of an Old Man and his Grandchild,’ has a far wider celebrity. It is not only as a specimen of Ghirlandaio’s decorative arrangement and intimate feeling, but as an outstanding masterpiece of Christian art, Christian because the painter has here sought and found that beauty of character which was utterly beyond the range of the pagan artists who found beauty in proportions.

When we remember that Ghirlandaio began painting late, and was carried off by a fever at the comparatively early age of forty four, we are astounded at the quantity and quality of the work he left behind. He was a man of immense energy and hated to be interrupted in his work. Once when his brother David bothered him on some domestic matter, he replied: ‘Leave me to work while you make provision, because now that I have begun to master my art I feel sorry that I am not employed to paint the entire circuit of the walls of Florence.’