Nativity

1480–1494

The Ghirlandaio workshop: one of Florence's largest

In the last decades of the fifteenth century the Ghirlandaio workshop, at once a production and a teaching enterprise, becomes one of the largest in Florence: the thirteen-year-old Michelangelo begins work there, Francesco Granacci and Pietro Torrigiani are trained there, and Davide, Benedetto, his brother-in-law Sebastiano Mainardi, Bartolomeo di Giovanni and others work in it. There are so many commissions that in his last years Domenico himself usually supplies the general plan or sketch and the main details, while his assistants carry them out.

1490

The workshop on Piazza Antinori and a venture with Baccio d'Agnolo

The only surviving payment document of the workshop, dated 1490, shows that it was on Piazza Antinori and was part of the large workshop of the architect and wood-carver Baccio d'Agnolo, with whom Domenico set up a commercial enterprise and carried out several commissions.

11 January 1494

Death from a fever within five days

Ghirlandaio suddenly falls ill with a malignant fever that, according to Vasari, takes his life in five days, and dies on 11 January 1494 in his forty-sixth year; the parish register records that the loss is great, since the deceased was a man of importance in every respect.

11 januari 1494

Died