The Louvre: Fifty Plates in ColourBrockwell, Maurice W.
History
The Louvre: Fifty Plates in Colour
Brockwell, Maurice W.
Musée du Louvre
The influence of Alessio Baldovinetti is reflected in the pictures of
Cosimo Rosselli (1437-1507). Nothing is officially ascribed to him in
this collection, but the _Annunciation, with St. John the Baptist, St.
Anthony, St. Catherine, and St. Peter Martyr_ (No. 1656), which is here
catalogued as by an Unknown fifteenth-century Florentine painter, is
apparently his work. It is inscribed with the date A.D.M.CCCCLXXIII.
THE GOLDSMITH PAINTERS
During the generation which preceded the activity of Domenico
Ghirlandaio (1449-1494) (who appears in the official Catalogue under
the name of Grillandaio) the art of the painter had often been combined
with that of the architect and sculptor. In time the influence of the
goldsmith is seen in the inclination of the more prosaic painters,
among whom Ghirlandaio holds an important place, to subordinate the
pictorial qualities of their compositions to the gold-worker’s love
of ornamental detail and fanciful jewellery. Paintings carried out
in the goldsmith’s shop thus contained in the action of the figures,
the treatment of the draperies, and the fanciful head-dresses,
imitations of silver and bronze work. Domenico Bigordi owed the name
of Ghirlandaio, by which he is now generally known, to his having been
apprenticed to a goldsmith who acquired fame as a maker of the jewelled
coronals (_ghirlande_) that became fashionable. This pupil of Alessio
Baldovinetti, who was a craftsman quite as much as a painter, is
to-day best known by the large number of frescoes he painted in Tuscany.
[Illustration:
PLATE III.—DOMENICO GHIRLANDAIO
(1449-1494)
FLORENTINE SCHOOL
No. 1322.—PORTRAIT OF AN OLD MAN AND HIS GRANDSON
(“THE BOTTLE-NOSED MAN”)
(Portrait d’un Vieillard et de son petit-fils)
An old man, wearing a red robe edged with fur, looks down tenderly
at his golden-haired little grandson who lifts up his face to be
kissed. Through an open casement is seen a landscape.
Painted in tempera on panel.
2 ft. 0½ in. × 1 ft. 6¼ in. (0·62 × 0·46.)]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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