Domenico Ghirlandaio: Artist and Artisan.

Jean K. Cadogan. Domenico Ghirlandaio: Artist and Artisan. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001. xii + 425 pp. 121 color pls. and 164 b/w pls. index. illus. bibl. $75. ISBN: 0-300-08720-9.

This monograph on the late Quattrocento Florentine painter Domenico Ghirlandaio provides a careful consideration of a prolific artist who was important in his own time. Although he remains renowned for the presence of the youthful Michelangelo in his shop, Ghirlandaio's career was overshadowed by the artists who preceded and followed him, Masaccio and Leonardo da Vinci. Cadogan begins with a perceptive analysis of the characteristics and methodologies by which he has been judged by important critics and their eras. Her larger goal is to look at his work through a broad account of his period, and that constitutes part 1, which discusses the life and career of the artist. Part 2 is a Catalogue Raisonne of autograph works by

Ghirlandaio and his brother Davide, preceded by a useful checklist; part 3 provides documents concerning Ghirlandaio and his family.

Part 1 begins by looking at a group portrait of members of Ghirlandaio's shop, including the master, his presumed teacher, brother, and brother-in-law, within a large scene from the cycle of the Lives of the Virgin and John the Baptist, at Sta. Maria Novella, Florence. Bolstered by dowries, records of residence, public office, family worship, and finances, Cadogan observes that it is a testament to his self-presentation as a pious and enterprising craftsman, successful financially and socially, and heedful of outward appearances. The following chapter thoughtfully concentrates on the master's training, the influence of the Pollaiuolo brothers and Verrocchio, and early works.

At the heart of the rich chapter on "The Narratives" is a section on the Sta. Maria Novella fresco cycle of the Lives of the Virgin and St. John the Baptist. Cadogan considers its commission and program, and Ghirlandaio's use of illusion and narrative style (including setting, action, time, architecture, genre details, and portraiture) as well as prototypes near and far. Obviously thorough, she occasionally overstates the obvious or is repetitive, for instance in twice comparing the same three scenes from Benozzo Gozzoli's cycle of St. Augustine in San Gimignano to Ghirlandaio's Virgin and John the Baptist cycle. At times she might have been more audacious. Why was the Expulsion of Joachim added to the program after the contract? (Since Ghirlandaio's predilection for narrative clarity has already been shown, the discussion in the text of which artists showed the expulsion with the annunciation to Joachim and which, like Ghirlandaio, illustrated the expulsion alone obfuscates the issue.) She notes the theory that the two exclusively male temple settings contrast with the two female childbirth scenes, but does not try to reconcile this notion with other interpretations, including the possible meaning of the Expulsion to the patron at a date after the contract. In the discussion of the Dance of Salome, Cadogan is sensitive to Ghirlandaio's narrative structure, which does not repeat figures as in the Birth of the Virgin but chooses instead a main action and a complementary one both to visualize the essential event of the story and to encourage the viewer to recall the entire story. An examination of Ghirlandaio's precise role here in the history of temporal representation deserves further scrutiny, especially given recent research in the area. In this lavishly illustrated volume, the discussion would have been assisted by plates of each wall in its entirety. The precedents to this cycle, which are at San Gimignano, Rome, and Florence, are briefly discussed afterward, and this organization serves to underscore many o f her points about the Sta. Maria Novella chapel and elucidate Ghirlandaio's development.

Ghirlandaio has an important role in the history of fifteenth-century drawing, inventing techniques, drawing types, and procedures that survived into the next century, and students of Renaissance drawing will learn much from the chapter "Drawings and Working Method." Ghirlandaio's varied but highly developed graphic style, Cadogan shows, reflects the Verrocchio shop in the Florentine tradition of sculpturesque form, and then Leonardo, but also Ghirlandaio's independent vision. His drawings reveal a consistent style which evolved in the same general direction in the case of both frescoes and small scale panel paintings. Cadogan's analysis shows that Ghirlandaio used composition drawings of all types, not necessarily working toward more finished drawings. In all periods of his career he executed figure drawings for details; only after many composition and figure drawings were modelli produced, and never squaring these, he preferred cartoons. Relatively finished drawings of compositions served as ricordi to be kept in the workshop.

Having established Ghirlandaio's skill as master storyteller and craftsman, Cadogan concludes with a look at Ghirlandaio's treatment of various genres. Admittedly brief, it may be interpreted as suggestions for further research. Whereas the portraits within the narrative cycles are carefully delineated in terms of meaning in the earlier chapter, the independent ones are not considered in light of recent scholarship. Altarpieces are discussed without reference to the plethora of specialized studies in that area. The catalogues for Domenico Ghirlandaio and his brother Davide are scrupulously prepared, and a short study of Davide's drawings is included. (In a small number of cases, the reader would benefit from the author's reasons for omitting what are key works, such as the Portrait of a Woman in the Gulbenkian Collection, Lisbon, from Domenico's oeuvre.) The documents include many previously unpublished.