t, with
twenty-odd towers in addition to the gates. His next great frescoes
were those in the Palazzo Vecchio and S. Trinita. It was in 1485
that he painted his delightful Adoration, at the Accademia, and in
1486 he began his great series at S. Maria Novella, finishing them
in 1490, his assistants being his brother David, Benedetto Mainardi,
who married Ghirlandaio's sister, and certain apprentices, among them
the youthful Michelangelo, who came to the studio in 1488.

The story of the frescoes is this. Ghirlandaio when in Rome had
met Giovanni Tornabuoni, a wealthy merchant whose wife had died
in childbirth. Her death we have already seen treated in relief by
Verrocchio in the Bargello. Ghirlandaio was first asked to beautify
in her honour the Minerva at Rome, where she was buried, and this
he did. Later when Giovanni Tornabuoni wished to present S. Maria
Novella with a handsome benefaction, he induced the Ricci family,
who owned this chapel, to allow him to re-decorate it, and engaged
Ghirlandaio for the task. This meant first covering the fast fading
frescoes by Orcagna, which were already there, and then painting over
them. What the Orcagnas were like we cannot know; but the substitute,
although probably it had less of curious genius in it was undoubtedly
more attractive to the ordinary observer.

The right wall, as one faces the window (whose richness of coloured
glass, although so fine in the church as a whole, is here such a
privation), is occupied by scenes in the story of the Baptist; the
left by the life of the Virgin. The left of the lowest pair on the
right wall represents S. Mary and S. Elizabeth, and in it a party of
Ghirlandaio's stately Florentine ladies watch the greeting of the two
saints outside Florence itself, symbolized rather than portrayed,
very near the church in which we stand. The girl in yellow, on the
right of the picture, with her handkerchief in her hand and wearing a
rich dress, is Giovanna degli Albizzi, who married Lorenzo Tornabuoni
at the Villa Lemmi near Florence, that villa from which Botticelli's
exquisite fresco, now in the Louvre at the top of the main staircase,
in which she again is to be seen, was taken. Her life was a sad
one, for her husband was one of those who conspired with Piero di
Lorenzo de' Medici for his return some ten years later, and was
beheaded. S. Elizabeth is of course the older woman. The companion
to this picture represents the angel appearing to S. Zachar