Harmony and Ritualistic Allusion in the Tornabuoni Chapel in Santa Maria Novella. (Volumes I and II) (Italy).

Abstract

The chapel painted by Domenico Ghirl and aio and his workshop for Giovanni Tornabuoni in the Florentine church of Santa Maria Novella during the period 1486-1490 represents one of the most ambitious commissions of the early Renaissance. Despite recognition of the significance of this monument, the coherent system that governed the chapel has been consistently overlooked. When one reconstructs the altar painted by Ghirl and aio and his shop and placed in the center of the chapel by 1497 it becomes apparent that this double altarpiece was the crucial and dominating element that gave meaning to the surrounding frescoes. The Tornabuoni Altarpiece separated the chapel into two zones. The outer chapel presented a vast Thomistic tableau of ascending visions of Christ. The inner chapel was a private zone, in keeping with the Florentine tradition of family chapels, where a visual meditation upon death and resurrection was created to commemorate family members. The key to both zones was the Tornabuoni Altarpiece and the eucharistic tabernacle that it supported. Ghirl and aio was commissioned to repaint the walls of the high chapel at Santa Maria Novella several years before Giovanni Tornabuoni gained control of the high altar. In 1488 Giovanni succeeded in removing the original, trecento altarpiece. He then exp and ed his plan into an ambitious program that encompassed the frescoes, a new altarpiece, and virtually all the other elements of the chapel. This pivotal shift at the midpoint in Ghirl and aio's work resolves the question of why the contract of 1485 was ab and oned in favor of the sequence of scenes we now find in the lower zones of the chapel. Once the original elements of the Tornabuoni Chapel are properly understood, it emerges that the monument was the product of a profound and meticulous design. Ghirl and aio's art paid subtle attention to ritualistic function and tradition at Santa Maria Novella. The result was a system of striking coherence that established the Tornabuoni Chapel among the preeminent examples of the Florentine burial chapel in the fifteenth century.