Whatever the verdict as to his nominally religious painting, in portraiture Ghirlandaio is one of the greatest figures of his time. Portraits of the finest qualities abound in his frescoes, and he has left a few incomparable things on panel. Few Renaissance portraits have the authority of the amazing old man, Figure 126, in the Louvre, who fondles an adoring boy. In this picture, deformity becomes a grace, and the spiritual and material interpretation are of equal incisiveness and beauty. As fine in another vein is the profile of Giovanna degli Albizzi in the J. P. Morgan Collection, Figure 101. It is dated in 1488. It is the supreme portrait of a Florentine beauty of a passing and lovely moment. An instant of time, when the old simplicity had enriched itself with new learning; when with the new humanism the tournament and court of love persisted; when courtly manners had become an ideal without freezing into an official code—all this is for a sensitive and informed observer in this placid well-poised head of an ill-starred Florentine bride. She died in 1488, a little before the overthrow of the Florence she typifies. Her accomplished young husband, Lorenzo Tornabuoni, equally adequate in the tilt yard, the study, or the council hall, lived on for nine years and shared the death agony of the society of which he was a chief ornament. When his head fell under Savonarola’s orders, a splendid chapter of early Florentine humanism closed. Thus these young people died with their Florence, leaving no descendants, but a memory eternally fragrant. The year of Giovanna’s death, 1488, Ghirlandaio, being thirty-nine years old, took a new wife, and continued diligently at the frescoes of Santa Maria Novella. Not being overburdened with imagination, he probably never guessed he was occupied with a memorial of a society already doomed. Doubtless he followed the fashionable throng to San Marco where for a year Fra Girolamo Savonarola had been preaching against the current vanities. Ghirlandaio presumably approved the oratory, with a comfortable sense that while unworldliness might very properly be preached, no sensible city could ever be induced to practice it. Perhaps he never woke up to the appalling fact that Savonarola literally meant business both evangelically and politically.