Benozzo Gozzoli

Benozzo Gozzoli painted the most crowded and cheerful fresco cycle of the Florentine fifteenth century and spent his career being useful rather than revolutionary. He trained as a goldsmith, worked on Ghiberti's bronze doors for the Florence Baptistery, and then assisted Fra Angelico in Rome and Orvieto, which gave him a technique of great fluency and a permanently sunnier temperament than his master. His masterpiece is the Journey of the Magi in the chapel of the Palazzo Medici Riccardi, finished in 1461, in which the three kings ride through a Tuscan landscape at the head of a procession that is transparently the Medici family and their allies, including a self-portrait with his name on his cap. It is a religious subject used as a political photograph. He also produced an enormous cycle of Old Testament scenes at the Campo Santo in Pisa, which took sixteen years and was destroyed by an incendiary shell in 1944, and the Triumph of Saint Thomas Aquinas, which shows the scholastic method as a diagram: Aquinas enthroned between Aristotle and Plato with Averroes defeated at his feet. Vasari thought him limited and prolific, which was meant unkindly and is roughly accurate. He worked steadily for fifty years, took whatever commissions came, and died of plague at Pistoia in 1497. The Journey of the Magi is also a document of a specific week. The procession is usually read as a memory of the Council of Florence of 1439, when the Byzantine emperor and the patriarch of Constantinople came west to negotiate the union of the churches, and Gozzoli painted their retinues from life twenty years later. The union failed. Constantinople fell in 1453. The fresco is a celebration of an event whose whole purpose had already collapsed by the time it was painted.

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