Page "Domenico Ghirlandaio" Paragraph 6

Back in Florence in 1485, Ghirlandaio painted fresco cycles in the Sassetti Chapel of Santa Trinita for the donor and banker Francesco Sassetti, the powerful manager of the branch of the Medici bank in Genoa, a position subsequently filled by Giovanni Tornabuoni, Ghirlandaio's future patron.

In the chapel, Ghirlandaio painted six scenes from the life of Saint Francis, including Saint Francis obtaining from Pope Honorius the Approval of the Rules of His Order, the saint's Death and Obsequies and a Resuscitation by the interposition of the beatified Francis of a child of the Spini family, who had died as a result of a fall from a window.

The first work depicts a portrait of Lorenzo de ' Medici, and the third, the painter's own likeness, which he also included in one of his pictures in the Santa Maria Novella as well as in the Adoration of the Magi in the Florentine orphanage, the Ospedale degli Innocenti.

The altarpiece from the Sassetti chapel, the Adoration of the Shepherds, is now in the Florentine Accademia.