ll
are two far more attractive works by Bastiano Mainardi (Ghirlandaio's
brother-in-law and assistant at S. Maria Novella) than any in Florence.

Alessio, who was born in 1427, was an open-handed ingenious man who
could not only paint and do mosaic but once made a wonderful clock for
Lorenzo. His experiments with colour were disastrous: hence most of his
frescoes have perished; but possibly it was through Alessio's mistakes
that Ghirlandaio acquired the use of such a lasting medium. Alessio
was an independent man who painted from taste and not necessity.

Ghirlandaio's chief influences, however, were Masaccio, at the Carmine,
Fra Lippo Lippi, and Verrocchio, who is thought also to have been
Baldovinetti's pupil and whose Baptism of Christ, in the Accademia,
painted when Ghirlandaio was seventeen, must have given Ghirlandaio
the lines for his own treatment of the incident in this church. One
has also only to compare Verrocchio's sculptured Madonnas in the
Bargello with many of Ghirlandaio's to see the influence again;
both were attracted by a similar type of sweet, easy-natured girl.

When he was twenty-six Ghirlandaio went to Rome to paint the Sixtine
library, and then to San Gimignano, where he was assisted by Mainardi,
who was to remain his most valuable ally in executing the large
commissions which were to come to his workshop. His earliest Florentine
frescoes are those which we shall see at Ognissanti; the Madonna della
Misericordia and the Deposition painted for the Vespucci family and
only recently discovered, together with the S. Jerome, in the church,
and the Last Supper, in the refectory. By this time Ghirlandaio and
Botticelli were in some sort of rivalry, although, so far as I know,
friendly enough, and both went to Rome in 1481, together with Perugino,
Piero di Cosimo, Cosimo Rosselli, Luca Signorelli and others, at
the command of Pope Sixtus IV to decorate the Sixtine chapel, the
excommunication of all Florentines which the Pope had decreed after
the failure of the Pazzi Conspiracy to destroy the Medici (as we saw
in chapter II) having been removed in order to get these excellent
workmen to the Holy City. Painting very rapidly the little band had
finished their work in six months, and Ghirlandaio was at home again
with such an ambition and industry in him that he once expressed the
wish that every inch of the walls of Florence might be covered by
his brush--and in those days Florence had walls all round i