As Ghirlandaio had moved from success to success, so he was destined to end in his day of highest glory. In 1485 he signed a contract with Giovanni Tornabuoni, of the old nobility, to decorate the choir of the most aristocratic church in Florence, Santa Maria Novella. The subjects, the Life of the Virgin and St. John the Baptist, were already on the wall in the guise of water-soaked and ruined frescoes by Andrea Orcagna. Ghirlandaio provided pastoral scenes with wide landscapes, city prospects with charming girls plentiful in foreground, rich patrician interiors with graceful women and their attendants making visits of ceremony, rare religious events with heavy magistrates and dignitaries standing inattentively by—everything in short that a prosperous and well-bred Florentine of the moment was accustomed to think desirable in beauty, gentleness, or worldly estate. Characteristic are the Salutation of Mary and Elizabeth, a picture in which the solemnity of the scene, so magnificently asserted by Giotto at Padua, slips away into mere spectacle and civility; the Birth of Saint John, Figure 125, with a young girl of the Tornabuoni family making her visit with her maids, and all manner of graceful and rich accessories; or again, the Presentation in The Temple, with a whole tribe of Tornabuonis and Ghirlandaios in negligent attendance on the sacred rite. These may stand for the whole. For their casual and mundane richness John Ruskin has poured upon these frescoes his double-distilled vials of wrath. What he says as to their superficiality and emptiness of religious feeling is true enough, yet his denunciatory rhetoric serves but as a trip-hammer to demolish an eggshell which has after all its iridescent frail beauty. Gentler methods are better with so gently mundane a creature as Ghirlandaio. The Lord’s people, as he saw them about him, were good enough for him and for his art. Criticism should rather insist that, being worldly, he was not worldly enough to be strong and lucid, but too readily had recourse to promiscuous richness and perfunctory ideals of prettiness. Still, it does not befit the age or race whose characteristic art product is the smiling or pensive girl on the cover of the popular magazine to throw the first stone at Domenico Ghirlandaio. [Illustration: FIG. 125. Domenico Ghirlandaio. Birth of St. John.—_Santa Maria Novella._ ] [Illustration: FIG. 126. Domenico Ghirlandaio. Old Man and Boy.—_Paris._ ]