Italian Early Renaissance Painter, 1449-1494 Florentine painter, whose family name was Bigordi. He may have studied painting and mosaics under Alesso Baldovinetti. Ghirlandaio was an excellent technician. Keenly observant of the contemporary scene, he depicted many prominent Florentine personalities within his religious narrative paintings. Among his earliest frescoes are the Madonna with the Vespucci Family and the Last Supper (Church of the Ognissanti, Florence). He painted scenes from the life of Santa Fina (collegiate church in San Gimigniano) and frescoes in the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence. In 1481, Pope Sixtus IV called him to Rome, along with Botticelli, to decorate the Sistine Chapel. He painted the Calling of the First Apostles, a scene close in spirit to Masaccio. He returned to Florence to work on the frescoes in the Sassetti Chapel in Santa Trinita. He introduced Sassetti, Corsi, Poliziano, the Medici, and many other contemporaries as participants in the life of St. Francis. Ghirlandaio's most famous achievement is his fresco cycle of the life of Mary and St. John the Baptist for the choir of Santa Maria Novella. Michelangelo served an apprenticeship with him at this time and probably worked on these frescoes. Other examples of his art are the Adoration of the Magi (Uffizi); another Adoration (Hospital of the Innocents); a mosaic of the Annunciation for the Cathedral; a portrait of Francesco Sassetti and his son (Metropolitan Mus.);   Related Paintings of GHIRLANDAIO, Domenico :. | Detail of the Adoration of the Magi | Birth of St John the Baptist | Resurrection of the Boy | Death and Assumption of the Virgin | Angel Appearing to Zacharias |
Related Artists:
Herman Han

Nicholas Pocock
British Painter, 1741-1821 English painter. After an apprenticeship in the Bristol shipbuilding yards of Richard Champion, Pocock began a career at sea in the mid-1760s. He was a practised and gifted amateur watercolourist (his earliest signed and dated watercolour is from 1762), and when in command of the Lloyd, one of Champion's merchantmen, he began to keep detailed logbooks illustrated with wash drawings (four at London, N. Mar. Mus.). In 1780 he gave up his sea career, married and sent his first oil painting to the Royal Academy. The picture arrived too late for exhibition, but Sir Joshua Reynolds wrote back, noting 'It is much beyond what I expected from a first essay in oil colours'. Pocock exhibited annually at the Academy between 1782 and 1812 and enjoyed a steady supply of commissions for oil paintings and watercolours, mostly of marine subject-matter. He produced a series of watercolour views of Bristol (stylistically close to Edward Dayes) in the 1780s, many of which were engraved, and of Iceland in 1791.
Girolamo dai Libri
(1474/1475 - July 2, 1555) was an Italian illuminator of manuscripts and painter of altarpieces, working in an early-Renaissance style. He was born and mainly active in Verona. His father was Francesco dai Libri, and was so named because he was an illuminator of books. Girolamo's works were noted by Giorgio Vasari. Girolamo was a pupil of Domenico Morone. Dai Libri painted his first altarpiece, a Deposition from the Cross for Santa Maria in Organo in Verona, at the age of sixteen.