Domenico Ghirlandaio was a Florentine painter of the fifteenth century, born Domenico Bigordi in 1448 or 1449, who died in Florence on January 11, 1494.
He ran one of the largest fresco workshops of his city, at a time when the Medici banking family held power there, and he trained the young Michelangelo.
His clients were bankers who wanted to be seen in the chapels they paid for, so he painted them into the crowd around the saints. Yet his best known picture is a small and unflattering panel in the Louvre, An Old Man and his Grandson.
In his frescoes, sacred stories happen in his own town. The Virgin is born in a Florentine bedroom with walls lined in wood, and the pope approves the rule of Saint Francis with the Piazza della Signoria, the main square of the city, in the background.
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Walls that size needed a team of assistants, and one boy in the workshop would become far more famous than his master: Michelangelo Buonarroti. His contract with the shop is odd.
On April 1, 1488, his father, Lodovico Buonarroti, bound the thirteen year old to Domenico and his brother David Ghirlandaio for three years, to learn to paint. The surprise is in who paid whom.
An apprentice's family normally paid the master, since a beginner costs more than he brings in. Here the shop was the one to pay, 24 florins over the three years, six in the first, eight in the second and ten in the third. A master pays only for work he expects, so the terms treat the boy as someone already useful.
In that shop Michelangelo learned fresco, the art of painting on a wall while its plaster is still wet. It is the technique he would use on the Sistine ceiling years later.
Michelangelo later denied owing his master anything. His biographer Ascanio Condivi, writing at his request, says the boy received no help from Domenico and calls the master envious.
Giorgio Vasari, a painter who wrote a famous book of artists' lives, did not let that stand. In the second edition of his book he printed the contract itself, proof that the boy had been bound to the shop.
When Michelangelo signed on, the shop was in the middle of a huge job: the choir of Santa Maria Novella, one of the great churches of Florence, which Ghirlandaio was covering with frescoes full of portraits of his clients.
A goldsmith's son named Bigordi
The master had started out in another trade. His father, Tommaso Bigordi, was a goldsmith, and the name Ghirlandaio, under which Domenico became famous, came out of that shop.
What You'll Discover
What the family nickname meant.
Which pope called him to Rome.
Who is watching in the square.
The extra pay he waved away.
The nose he refused to hide.
What her portrait admits it lacks.