DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.51584#0148
144
EARLY ITALIAN PAINTERS.
as one of the attendants in the Visit of the Virgin
to St. Elizabeth. In the other pictures he has in-
troduced the figures of Lorenzo de’ Medici, Poli-
ziano, Demetrio Greco, Marsilio Ficino, and other
celebrated persons (of whom there are notices in
Roscoe’s 4 Life of Lorenzo de’ Medici ’), besides
his own portrait and those of many other persons
of that time.
The idea of crowding these sacred and mystical
subjects with portraits of real persons and repre-
sentations of familiar objects may seem, on first
view, shocking to the taste, ridiculous anachronisms,
and destructive of all solemnity and unity of feel-
ing. Such, however, is not the case, but the re-
verse. In the first place the sacred and ideal per-
sonages are never portraits from nature, and are
very loftily conceived in point of expression and
significance. In the second place, the real per-
sonages introduced are seldom or never actors,
merely attendants and spectators in events which
may be conceived to belong to all time, and to
have no especial locality; and they have so much
dignity in their aspects, the costumes are so pic-
turesque, and the grouping is so fine and imagina-
tive, that only the coldest and most pedantic critic
could wish them absent.
When Ghirlandajo had finished this grand
series of pictures, his patron, Giovanni Tornabuoni,
declared himself well pleased; but, at the same
EARLY ITALIAN PAINTERS.
as one of the attendants in the Visit of the Virgin
to St. Elizabeth. In the other pictures he has in-
troduced the figures of Lorenzo de’ Medici, Poli-
ziano, Demetrio Greco, Marsilio Ficino, and other
celebrated persons (of whom there are notices in
Roscoe’s 4 Life of Lorenzo de’ Medici ’), besides
his own portrait and those of many other persons
of that time.
The idea of crowding these sacred and mystical
subjects with portraits of real persons and repre-
sentations of familiar objects may seem, on first
view, shocking to the taste, ridiculous anachronisms,
and destructive of all solemnity and unity of feel-
ing. Such, however, is not the case, but the re-
verse. In the first place the sacred and ideal per-
sonages are never portraits from nature, and are
very loftily conceived in point of expression and
significance. In the second place, the real per-
sonages introduced are seldom or never actors,
merely attendants and spectators in events which
may be conceived to belong to all time, and to
have no especial locality; and they have so much
dignity in their aspects, the costumes are so pic-
turesque, and the grouping is so fine and imagina-
tive, that only the coldest and most pedantic critic
could wish them absent.
When Ghirlandajo had finished this grand
series of pictures, his patron, Giovanni Tornabuoni,
declared himself well pleased; but, at the same