Gozzoli, Benozzo

(1420-1497)

   A pupil of Fra Angelico whom he assisted in the Chapel of Nicholas V (1448) at the Vatican. Gozzoli was born in Florence to a tailor. In the 1450s, he worked in Montefalco, near Perugia, where he painted a cycle in the Church of San Fortunato, now in fragments. The altarpiece for the church's main apse, the Madonna della Cintola is now in the Pinacoteca Vaticana. Gozzoli also rendered frescoes at San Francesco di Montefalco that depicted the life of St. Francis, the church's patron saint. In 1456, he was in Perugia creating the Madonna and Child with Saints (Perugia, Galleria Nazionale dell' Umbria), and two years later in Rome rendering the frescoes in the Albertoni Chapel at Santa Maria d'Aracoeli (late 1450s), of which only a damaged St. Anthony of Padua has survived. Gozzoli's most important commission is the fresco of the Procession of the Magi in the chapel at the Palazzo Medici, Florence (c. 1459). It reenacts a procession that took place once a year through the streets of Florence carried out by members of the city's most aristocratic confraternity, the Compagnia de' Re Magi, of which the Medici were members. In the work, the young Lorenzo de' Medici and his father, Piero de Gouty, are shown on horseback, and Gozzoli himself is included. He is the man with an inscription on his hat that reads Opus Benotti (the work of Benozzo). After this, Gozzoli went to Pisa and there he rendered a series of frescoes from the Old Testament in the Campo Santo (beg. 1469), damaged by bombing in 1944. Gozzoli's works show his full command of perspective and his interest in rendering courtly scenes and in describing all the fine details of figures, objects, and backdrops. Also, the emphasis is on brilliant colorism and heavy gilding. Gozzoli died in 1497 while working in Pistoia, perhaps from the plague.