Luca Landucci’s son Benedetto, who knew many of the people figured
in the frescoes pointed them out in 1561, when he was eighty-nine
years old, to Vincenzio Tornaquinci, who fortunately noted down his
words.[29] Giovanni Tornabuoni is to the right of the great central
window, kneeling bareheaded with his hands crossed over his breast, and
opposite to him kneels his wife Francesca, her hands folded in prayer,
with a white kerchief on her head. Signor E. Ridolfi exposes another
of Vasari’s mistakes, which has often been blindly copied without
verifying the dates.[30] Vasari states that “Ginevra de’ Benci, then a
beautiful maiden” is one of the women in the fresco of the Visitation
of Our Lady to S. Elizabeth. Ginevra was born in 1557, married to
Luigi Niccolini in 1573 and died on the 17th August in the same year,
so she could not have been painted by Ghirlandaio between 1486–1490.
The beautiful maiden is Giovanni Tornabuoni’s daughter-in-law, the
lovely and accomplished Giovanna degl’Albizzi, whose marriage to
Lorenzo Tornabuoni was celebrated with such pomp in Florence in 1486.
Two years later Niccolò Fiorentino made six medals of the Tornabuoni
family. Two of Giovanni, one of his son Lorenzo, one of his daughter
Lodovica, and two of his daughter-in-law Giovanna, and the latter
indubitably represent the same person as the slender, swan-necked girl,
in a splendid dress of gold brocade in Ghirlandaio’s fresco. She died,
fortunately for her, before the plot to reinstate Piero de’ Medici was
discovered. “On the 17th August, 1497,” writes Luca Landucci, “the
_Pratica_ met, and were in the palace from morning until midnight; they
were more than one hundred and eighty. And by vote it was determined
that they [the accused] should die, and all they had be confiscated.
Five were executed; first Bernardo del Nero, and then Niccolò Ridolfi,
Giovanni Cambi, Gianozzo Pucci and Lorenzo Tornabuoni, and all the
people grieved for them. Every one wondered that such a thing should be
done and could scarcely believe it. They were executed that very night,
and I shed many tears when I saw the youth Lorenzo on a bier passing
Tornaquinci just before daybreak.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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