Exactly six hundred and forty years ago today… I’d start like that, but before October 1582, it doesn’t really make sense to talk about round anniversaries. That’s when Pope Gregory XIII snatched ten days from the year to align his calendar with the heavens. So let’s rather start like this: on December 25, 1485 – whose round anniversary would fall on January 3, 2026 – the Sassetti Chapel in Santa Trìnita Church in Florence was consecrated, as confirmed by the date on the altarpiece above.
People don’t flock to Florence just for the Sassetti Chapel. And if they stumble upon it deep inside the church and are willing to toss a euro into the lighting box, they’ll linger for a while, marveling at Ghirlandaio’s vivid, saturated colors, then move on as the light fades. And yet, this cycle of frescoes and the altarpiece packs in a whole host of fascinating stories and connections.
• Who was Francesco Sassetti, and why did he commission a family chapel in Santa Trìnita, when he already had the city’s most prestigious chapel?
• What did it “mean” that he chose Ghirlandaio as the painter? In other words, what was Ghirlandaio’s “local value” on the contemporary art-social scene?
• And why did Ghirlandaio select these particular pictorial models for the commissioned theme, and how did he give them new meaning by changing details?
• Why was it important for Sassetti to depict his boss – Lorenzo de’ Medici – and his entire family on his most important fresco, and to base his own altarpiece on his subordinate’s altarpiece?
• Why does Ghirlandaio include antique ruins and inscriptions in the Nativity scene, where they certainly didn’t originally exist? What could they have meant to him, his patron, and contemporary viewers?
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Francesco Sassetti (1421-1490) was one of the wealthiest and most influential figures in contemporary Florence. He joined the Medici bank as a teenager, blazing through the Avignon and Geneva branches, and by age thirty-eight he became the general manager of the entire Medici financial empire – the highest office a non-Medici could achieve.
Francesco Sassetti and his “second Teodoro” son in a painting by Ghirlandaio, c. 1488
As an insider of the Medici, he had access to Lorenzo’s humanist gatherings, the Platonic Academy, and was captivated by the new spirit of the age. He surrounded himself with humanist friends and built a vast library, which passed to the Medici after his death; a splendid exhibition was recently held about it at the Biblioteca Laurenziana.
A man of such rank deserved his own family chapel, and Sassetti had one – in the most prestigious place possible: the sanctuary chapel of the Dominican Santa Maria Novella, the elite church of Florence. But when he began planning its decoration in the late 1470s, the Dominicans wouldn’t allow him to decorate it with cycles of his patron saint, St. Francis of Assisi. The Dominicans and Franciscans competed for Florence’s elite families and couldn’t let the sanctuary of their central church be dominated by a saint from the rival order. Sassetti therefore gave up on that chapel and bought another at Santa Trìnita on the Arno, also an important site for elite family chapels.
Domenico Ghirlandaio (1448-1494) had two striking social traits: first, like Sassetti, he rose quickly on a steep career path, and second, he was one of the Medici’s favorite painters. By age twenty, he painted the chapel of the local saint, Santa Fina, in the San Gimignano cathedral, then went on to decorate the Vespucci family chapel and refectory in the Ognissanti church, another key site like Santa Trìnita. In 1481, he was commissioned to paint the large council hall in Florence’s town hall, and in the same year Lorenzo de’ Medici sent him to Rome with other Medici-associated painters – Botticelli, Perugino, Pinturicchio, Cosimo Rosselli – to “make peace” with Pope Sixtus IV by decorating the Sistine Chapel’s side walls in the trendy new Florentine style.
These works elevated Ghirlandaio to the ranks of the most prestigious and sought-after artists, perfectly signaling his patron’s social status and his loyalty to the Medici. On top of that, he was an excellent organizer and businessman, running a well-managed family workshop, so he could take on large wall surfaces with tight deadlines and deliver on time. For example, the total wall surface of the Tornabuoni Chapel he executed in the late 1480s matched that of the Sistine Chapel… but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. The key point is that with Ghirlandaio, Sassetti secured a painter of great renown whose multi-figure, colorful, landscape-and-architecture compositions were loved by the elite, and who could reliably complete a chapel on time, so the patron could see it in his lifetime. That alone was exceptional among Florence’s often over-committed artists.
The central theme of the Sassetti Chapel is therefore the life of Saint Francis. It seems paradoxical that one of Florence’s wealthiest men wanted to depict the life of “God’s poor little man,” but he was his patron saint. And, as we shall see, through these scenes he could tell something very intimate, very personal.
By this time, painting the life of Saint Francis had already become a tradition established at the heart of his cult, the Basilica of Saint Francis in Assisi, by Giotto between 1297-1300, who also developed its final, mature version condensed from twenty-eight to seven episodes in the Bardi Chapel of Santa Croce in Florence after 1317. This chapel served as a school for trecento artists. Young painters came here to copy the images and learn the master’s style, just as quattrocento artists flocked to Masaccio’s works in the Brancacci Chapel. This Saint Francis cycle became authoritative; you couldn’t ignore it when selecting or composing scenes. And if a painter did diverge, it had meaning. Just like here, in the Sassetti Chapel.
The chapel walls are divided into three horizontal bands. In the lower band, opposite the altarpiece, Francesco Sassetti and his wife Nera Corsi kneel on either side, and along the side walls, each in a semi-circular niche, stand their sarcophagi. The six episodes of Saint Francis’ life run around the middle band’s three rectangles and the upper band’s three pointed arches. The cycle is meant to be read from left to right and top to bottom, with a twist: the final scene is not on the right side, but above the altar.
Renouncing worldly goods is the first scene (Ghirlandaio above, Giotto below in Santa Croce). The group in the foreground roughly mirrors Giotto’s image, with one difference: to the right, behind the young Francis covered with his cloak, there are not clerics but Florentine citizens, as in other works by Ghirlandaio, and Francis’ father’s anger has mostly subsided: he still needs restraint, but he is slowly resigning himself to the inevitable. The big innovation is in the background. While Giotto’s scenes play out in box-like spaces, here too only a slightly turned building indicates depth, Ghirlandaio opens up a vast perspective with a long city wall, a wide river, and mountains. No Florentine viewer probably imagined Assisi’s small hill town looked like this, but that wasn’t the goal – it was the sense of expansiveness and richness that made Ghirlandaio a sought-after painter.
The second scene depicts the Receiving of the Rule from the Pope. Here, Ghirlandaio again opens up Giotto’s box, transforming it into a spacious Renaissance palace with a city square unfolding through its arches. It’s clear that he relocated the event from Rome to Florence: on the left you can see the façade of the Signoria with the Marzocco lion, opposite stands the Loggia dei Lanzi. He also increased the number of participants: inside the church, the entire episcopal body, and on the two sides of the painting, groups of Florentine citizens observe the scene. On the right stands Sassetti himself, with his son Federigo to his left, and his boss, Lorenzo de’ Medici, to his right, alongside his father-in-law Antonio Pucci, who at this time was gonfaloniere, the highest magistrate in Florence. On the left stand three young men whom Sassetti points out: these are his sons, Galeazzo, Teodoro, and Cosimo, of whom Teodoro had already been dead for several years – since 1479.
In the foreground, there is curiously a staircase, on which a group of young men is ascending. Lorenzo de’ Medici gestures toward them, indicating that these are his children, led by their tutor Angelo Poliziano.
The Berlin Kupferstichkabinett preserves a Ghirlandaio sketch that already shows this staircase, but with different figures ascending: more clerics, in a solemn procession, to emphasize the importance of the event. There must have been a reason why Sassetti replaced them with Lorenzo’s children. This way, the two families—the one he founded and the one he serves—are organically intertwined in the painting. Including Lorenzo and Pucci highlights for the viewer that, during a difficult period when Sassetti’s banking competence was questioned, his boss firmly stood by his side.
What was this difficult period? Sassetti had immersed himself so deeply in the humanities that it began to affect his duties as chief banker. He paid less attention to overseeing the foreign bank branches, and the Bruges branch manager, Tommaso Portinari, took advantage by engaging in risky investments that ultimately collapsed, bankrupting the branch, one of the most important in Europe, at the heart of the Low Countries. Sassetti’s authority was shaken, and this needed to be visually restored by featuring the Family in his own family chapel.
The third scene on the right depicts the famous trial by fire before the Sultan. In 1219, Francis traveled to the Holy Land to convert the Egyptian Sultan. (It’s no coincidence that Pope Francis chose 2019 for his first trip to a Muslim country, Abu Dhabi.) To prove his faith, he offered to undergo a trial by fire, inviting the Sultan’s mullahs as well. In the paintings, he stands before the Sultan in a simple woolen robe, in Arabic suf—like a Christian Sufi—praying and pointing to the fire. Ghirlandaio basically follows Giotto’s composition in Santa Croce. There, Giotto had significantly altered his earlier Assisi composition. In Assisi, Francis is the central figure, surrounded by the Sultan and his clergy. In the Bardi Chapel, however, the Sultan becomes the focal point, as he must choose between the two faiths, pointing with his hand to the fire suggested by Francis while watching his fleeing priests with his eyes. Ghirlandaio merely adds a few European-dressed figures, arranges the group in a semicircle, and opens up the view through the large windows to a pointed seascape.
In the row of central rectangular images, the left one depicts the Receiving of the Stigmata. Here, Ghirlandaio does not show Francis in the backward-leaning, almost reluctant pose of the Bardi Chapel, but follows the relief on the pulpit in Santa Croce, carved by his friend Benedetto da Maiano (who, it was recently discovered also worked for King Matthias of Hungary in the Franciscan church of the royal town Visegrád). Francis turns full-faced and with devotion toward the Christ-seraph projecting the wounds onto him. Ghirlandaio again renders nature with lavish detail, conveying the mystical union. In the background, the coastal town with its leaning tower is identified as Pisa: this is where the Arno flows into the sea, originating from the La Verna hill visible here.
On the right-hand wall, we see the Lamentation over the dead Francis. Here again, Ghirlandaio follows Giotto, depicting Francis laid out along the length of the scene, surrounded by his fellow friars leaning over him, with clergy performing the funeral rites on either side. In both paintings, Gerolamo the doctor is present, examining the authenticity of Francis’ stigmata. And in both, there’s a seemingly insignificant figure looking upward, toward the real event above: where angels lift Francis’ soul to heaven. In Giotto, this is clearly shown, as is the priest looking up near Francis’ head. In Ghirlandaio, only the gaze of the acolyte at the foot of the bier hints—like a nod—to viewers familiar with Giotto’s version of the supernatural event above.
To the right of the clergy, at the edge of the painting, stand three men in civic attire. The eldest is likely Sassetti himself, the young man is his deceased son Teodoro, whom we saw with similar features in the Receiving of the Rule, and the little boy is the second Teodoro, born that same year, 1479, when the first passed away. Their alternating presence fits perfectly, since Francis’ death is also a heavenly birth. It’s as if Sassetti is offering the elder son’s attention to Francis, who is also departing to the afterlife, while giving thanks for his younger son.
Finally, the last and most important image, opposite, above the altar, depicts a miracle performed by Francis posthumously. Here, Ghirlandaio diverges most from the original, where Giotto had depicted a different miracle: Saint Francis appearing to Saint Anthony of Padua while preaching in Arles after Francis’ death. Originally, this scene was intended here as well, as Ghirlandaio’s sketch in the Biblioteca Corsini shows. But at the patron’s request, it was changed.
Just as later in the Tornabuoni Chapel the patron asked Ghirlandaio to depict Zechariah naming his son John, rather than John the Baptist’s desert retreat—since he had a grandson Giovanni born at the same time—so this image in the Francis cycle also commemorates a family event. Sassetti’s firstborn son Teodoro had died in 1479, but later that same year another son was born, also named Teodoro. Sassetti, then fifty-eight, and his wife near forty, regarded this as a wonderful divine gift, and so he replaced the Arles apparition with another posthumous miracle of Francis: the resurrection of a child who had fallen from a window.
The scene is set in the Piazza Santa Trìnita; on the right, we see the church’s Romanesque façade before its Baroque transformation. In the background are houses, several of which belonged to Sassetti. Among the viewers on the left are several members of the Sassetti family, including his daughter Sibilla in white with a veil, who would marry Antonio Pucci’s son, the gonfaloniere, depicted in the Receiving of the Rule. Perhaps her name inspired the chapel’s “frame story” with the sibyls, which we will discuss shortly. On the far right stands the painter himself, Ghirlandaio. Vasari notes this, and his face also resembles other self-portraits, for example in the Tornabuoni Chapel, where he stands at the right edge of the scene observing Joachim being expelled from the church alongside his fellow painters.
The chapel’s iconography fits into a "frame story" provided by the Sibyls, those ancient prophetesses who, with single hints, foretold the birth of Christ. Their credibility was acknowledged by Saint Jerome (Ad Jovianum 1:41), and the Renaissance, eager for all things antique, happily embraced them. Their first known depiction was commissioned by Cardinal Giordano Orsini in 1420 for his Roman palace. Francesco Sassetti likely saw them there, and perhaps commissioned them for his chapel partly because of his daughter Sibilla. This early appearance was the first stop on a triumphal journey of images that would later include figures by Filippino Lippi, Raphael, and Michelangelo in Santa Maria Novella, the Church of Pace, and the Sistine Chapel.
In the Sassetti Chapel, a Sibyl sits in each of the four vault panels, similarly to the four evangelists in other church vaults. But there is also a famous Sibyl scene above the chapel entrance, probably not by Ghirlandaio himself but by his assistants, where the Tiburtine Sibyl dissuades Emperor Augustus from declaring himself a god by showing him in a vision that the one who is both man and God has just been born. In honor of this, Augustus consecrates the Ara Coeli Temple on the Capitol, which, if the story were true, we should consider the first Christian church ante festam. The prophecy is fulfilled in the altarpiece, depicting the Nativity, with the background city identifiable as Rome, dominated by the still-standing Torre delle Milizie, which in the Middle Ages was considered Augustus’ tomb.
Compared to the Saint Francis cycle, it’s a big shift that the main altarpiece depicts the Nativity. But for contemporary viewers, the two were closely linked. Saint Francis was the one who, in 1223 at Greccio, set up the first nativity scene, so the depiction of the Bethlehem stable was almost organically part of the Francis cycle. The two scenes were often paired to emphasize the parallel between Christ and his most perfect follower, Francis, as seen in Taddeo Gaddi’s reliquary panels painted for Santa Croce’s sacristy around 1340.
But before we focus on the altarpiece, the true centerpiece of the chapel, we must mention another altarpiece that served as Ghirlandaio’s model and was commissioned by none other than Tommaso Portinari, the Medici bank manager in Bruges whose mismanagement had shaken Sassetti’s reputation. This is the enormous Portinari Altarpiece painted by Hugo van der Goes in Ghent, now displayed in its own room at the Uffizi.
Tommaso Portinari commissioned the altarpiece for the high altar of the Church of San Egidio in the largest Florentine hospital, the Santa Maria Nuova. The hospital had been founded by his great-grandfather, Folco Portinari, who was also the father of Dante’s Beatrice, and Tommaso likely wanted to enhance the prestige of this family foundation with an altarpiece that Florentines, admirers of Netherlandish art, would greatly value. But originally, he hadn’t thought of Hugo van der Goes.
Portinari’s local superior, Angelo Tani, director of the Bruges Medici bank branch, did everything he could to block his subordinate’s advancement, writing letters to Sassetti in Florence warning that Portinari intended to issue overly risky loans. Portinari primarily considered himself a diplomat, aiming to win favor with local potentates, such as Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, through bank loans – and he succeeded. In 1465, for some reason, Angelo Tani was recalled to Florence, and Portinari took over the branch, setting his plans into motion. Without Sassetti’s oversight, he granted enormous loans to the Duke, who, however, fell at the Battle of Nancy in 1477 fighting the French, and the loans were lost with him, causing the collapse of the Bruges Medici branch.
But when Angelo Tani returned home, an unclaimed altarpiece commission remained. It seems he, too, had wanted to display a prestigious Netherlandish work in a Florentine church. This was Hans Memling’s Last Judgment. Portinari eventually took over the project in 1473 and proudly had his own portrait included in the face of the soul deemed heavy enough by Archangel Michael on the scales. It must have been a great satisfaction for him to claim not only his former boss’s position but also his altarpiece and his own place in it.
But ill-gotten gains come to ill ends. The ship that was to carry the altarpiece from Bruges along the French coast to Florence was seized by Baltic pirates, and the painting ended up in Danzig, today’s Gdańsk, where it is still proudly preserved to this day.
That’s when the Ghent master came into the picture. Since the commission was essentially a greenfield project, it could now be planned so that the entire Portinari family would fit. They kneel on the inner sides of the two hinged wings of the altarpiece, under the blessing hands of two protective saints each: on the left, the father and his two sons, Antonio and Pigello, under the protection of Saint Thomas and Saint Anthony the Hermit; on the right, his wife Maria Magdalena and daughter Margherita under the shadow of Saint Mary Magdalene and Saint Margaret of Antioch. Little Pigello had no space for a protective saint, and Portinari’s other, illegitimate daughter is also missing from the right side.
Judging by the children’s ages, the altarpiece was probably completed around 1477–78. This makes it Hugo van der Goes’ last work before he retired to a monastery, where he soon fell into depression – according to contemporary chronicles, he “lost his mind” and then passed away.
Émile Wauters: Hugo van der Goes’ Madness, 1872. As Gaspar Ofhuys’ chronicle recounts, Thomas Vessem, the prior, tried to heal him with music, just as David attempted with Saul.
I’m not sure, but perhaps the solemn, motionless, inward-looking expressions of the figures hint at this premonition.
At the center of the Nativity scene lies the newborn Jesus on the ground, with Mary kneeling before Him, hands clasped in prayer, as described in the famous visions of Saint Bridget of Sweden. Light radiates from Jesus, illuminating the stable’s foreground and dividing the image into a bright right side and a dark left, alluding to the darkness before Christ’s arrival. Kneeling angels surround Him, all wearing various liturgical vestments, which, together with the sheaf in the foreground, reference the Eucharist: as if the angels were celebrating the world’s first Mass, where the bread transformed into Christ’s body is now replaced by the newborn Jesus Himself. The healing power of the Eucharist made this especially fitting for a hospital altarpiece. This also explains the solemn, timeless gravity of the scene, contrasted by the “folk element” bursting in from the right: three very realistically depicted rustic shepherds. Their distinctly peasant appearance also alludes to the hospital’s audience, which consisted of Tuscan countryside figures seeking healing. Hugo van der Goes’ other Nativity paintings do not include such figures.
The space of the painting is staged like a theatrical set, fronted by a medicinal jar and a glass of water, blocking the view from the audience. Both hold flowers, all of which are somehow Marian symbols, though their interpretations vary. The gladiolus usually represents the Seven Sorrows of Mary, the “seven swords” that, according to Simeon’s prophecy, will pierce her heart. The modest violet in the glass may symbolize Mary’s humility, while the three red carnations refer to the three nails of Christ. Behind them stands a strong building; we would call it Romanesque, but in Gothic-building Netherlandish lands, it simply felt archaic, often linked with the Old Testament and Jewish tradition in paintings. Interestingly, the vanishing point of the painting lands precisely on the building’s doorway (porta), perhaps a subtle nod to the Portinari coat of arms. According to the hospital rules of Santa Maria Nuova, donors could not display their coats of arms on donations, making such a “hidden emblem” necessary.
The coat of arms of Folco Portinari, founder of the hospital, on the chapel floor
The altarpiece set out in 1483, ten years after the failed Memling altarpiece, just as the previous one had, by ship from Bruges. This time, however, it successfully reached the Atlantic, then the Mediterranean, touching Sicily, and finally arrived at the port of Pisa. There it was transferred to a smaller boat and brought up to Florence, unloaded at Porta San Frediano, and transported by ox cart to Santa Maria Nuova. Ringraziato sia Iddio, “Thanks be to God,” recorded the steward in the donation ledger.
The painting quickly became famous among Florentine painters. Not only because every new Netherlandish work was highly valued in Italy for its oil technique and hyperrealism, but also because the chapel hosted the gatherings of the Florentine painters’ guild of Saint Luke. It’s not impossible that Hugo van der Goes was aware of this and displayed the full arsenal of Netherlandish painting for his Florentine colleagues.
The Portinari altarpiece inspired many local painters. The first was Luca Signorelli, who in the same year completed his Saint Onofrio altarpiece, casually placing a similar glass of water in the foreground.
But the most detailed imitation was done by Ghirlandaio, precisely here, in the Sassetti Chapel. Winged altarpieces never became fashionable in Italy, but to imitate the Portinari altarpiece as closely as possible, Ghirlandaio painted the two donors, Sassetti and his wife, in apparent niches on either side of the Nativity, just as Hugo van der Goes had depicted the founder’s family members. This arrangement was unusual in Italy.
It may not be a coincidence that Sassetti chose to imitate the altarpiece of his failed subordinate, Portinari, aiming to compete in his own family chapel. It’s as if he sought to compensate for the Bruges loss in front of his boss, Lorenzo de’ Medici, and his family, depicted above the altarpiece.
The most striking reference in the Nativity is the rustic shepherds bursting into the stable. Ghirlandaio, however, transforms them from rough intruders into figures of the pastoral idyll, with whom the cultivated elite could identify. It’s no accident that the kneeling shepherd in front bears Ghirlandaio’s own features, recognizable from his other hidden self-portraits; even if unnoticed, he points to the ghirlando on the sarcophagus, marking his identity. The standing shepherd has also been linked by several scholars to Virgil, who in the 4th Eclogue made a reference to a child bringing the Golden Age, interpreted by Christianity as a prophecy of Christ.
The landscape changes too, from Hugo van der Goes’ bleak, oppressive setting to the gentle, idyllic pastoral scenery typical of Ghirlandaio. In the background, wooded hills with grazing shepherds and the Three Kings descending a winding path, distant rivers and sea, and cities identifiable as Rome and Jerusalem.
The most improbable element in the landscape is the abundance of ancient ruins. Such ruins could hardly have existed in Bethlehem at the time of Jesus, and Renaissance painters knew this well, as up until then they had avoided including such elements in Nativity scenes. The motif first appears about a decade earlier in Botticelli, but it is Ghirlandaio who scatters them so generously here for the first time.
One explanation is that according to Christian legends in the Legenda Aurea, many ancient temples collapsed at the birth of Jesus, pagan priests and prophets lost their power, and the ruins around the stable symbolize the fall of paganism.
It is telling, however, that ancient ruins do not appear around the stable throughout the entire Middle Ages, only in the latter half of the 1400s, when the relationship to antiquity underwent a radical change.
For contemporary humanists, ancient ruins—especially those of Rome—did not so much represent a rightly destroyed pagan world, but rather the memory of a admired and longed-for golden age: Roma quanta fuit ipsa ruina docet. At this time, awareness of the definitive loss of antiquity arises, as well as the tripartite division of history into Antiquity, Middle Ages, and Modern Age. That these ruins exist for them only in fragmentary form became the most authentic way to reference them in paintings. This is where the cult of ruins begins, which would become increasingly popular in Romanticism and even today. It also became fashionable for humanists to explore ancient ruins, the Renaissance precursor of modern urbex.
The inclusion of ancient ruins in the Nativity scene serves several purposes. First, it dates the event to the time of ancient Rome; second, it symbolizes the grandeur of a bygone era, evoked through antiquity; third, it brings the scene closer to an audience—including Sassetti himself—that held antiquity dear; and fourth, it illustrates the isolation of the Bethlehem stable, as the ruins, known to contemporaries as the Forum Romanum or Campo Vaccino, simultaneously suggested the campagna, the pastoral world outside the city.
Ghirlandaio also adds a clever antique reference for his discerning patron. The triumphal arch through which the Three Kings approach bears the inscription that it was erected by Hircanus, high priest of Jerusalem, in honor of Pompey, conqueror of the city. On the sarcophagus next to which Mary adores her newborn son, it says that Fulvius the augur, who fell during the capture of Jerusalem, predicted that from this sarcophagus a divinity would one day emerge.
Naturally, these inscriptions are apocryphal. No such triumphal arch existed in Jerusalem, not least because it was not customary to erect one in 63 BCE, during Pompey’s conquest. And no ancient source mentions Fulvius or his prophecy. The inscriptions were composed by the humanist Bartolomeo Fonzio, a famous collector of ancient inscriptions (who also gathered them in Buda in 1489) and a close friend of Sassetti. Their role here is to illustrate the course of history with the authority of antiquity: just as Roman rule replaced Judaism, so Christ’s rule supplants the Roman.
The sarcophagus “from which a divinity will emerge” carries yet another meaning. Jesus does not lie inside it as a manger-converted sarcophagus, but beside it, following Saint Bridget’s vision. He will emerge from it at the Resurrection. Sassetti and his wife watch this, hoping that by Christ’s mercy they too will rise to new life from their own sarcophagi embedded in the walls behind them.
Just as Hugo van der Goes placed a still life in the foreground of his painting, with flowers alluding to Mary’s virtues, Ghirlandaio similarly includes a “still life” of three types of stones: the rough stone representing the Sassetti name, a brick referring to his wife Corso, and between them a finely carved marble piece, bearing a robin that alludes to the crucifixion of Jesus. As if by the grace of this divine sacrifice, the raw stones are transformed into noble sculptural elements fit to be part of the heavenly Jerusalem.
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