Page:The painters of Florence from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century (1915).djvu/275

1494] and blue-headed peacocks and other bright-winged birds perch on the marble balustrade. In both the traditional form of composition is retained, and there is the same absence of dramatic intention and the same careful rendering of the dishes and water-bottles, the cherries and loaves of bread. The painter's interest, we feel, lies wholly in the external aspect of the scene before him. He has no care for the deeper meanings which lie under the surface of life, or the fitful play of human passions and emotions, but is content to reproduce what is passing before his eyes as truthfully and exactly as possible. Unlike Botticelli and Leonardo, he has no type or ideal of his own, but his realism, as Dr. Woltmann has truly said, is kept in check by a certain dignity of style which lifts his larger compositions above the common-place, and gives them an imposing air. With the single exception of a Vulcan which he painted for Lorenzo de' Medici's villa at Spedaletto, Ghirlandajo was entirely engaged upon sacred subjects, which in his hands became a frame for the portraits of the chief Florentine men and women of the day. His frescoes thus acquire the value of historic documents, and give us a sober and dignified, if somewhat prosaic, record of the Medicean age. In 1481, he received a commission to paint a fresco in the same hall of the Palazzo Pubblico which Botticelli, Perugino, and Filippino had been engaged to decorate. None of these masters seem to have executed the work assigned to them, and the only fresco of the series in existence is Ghirlandajo's Triumph of St Zenobius, with a group of Roman warriors above and a view of the Duomo and Baptistery in the background. The