Ghirlandaio, Benedetto (b Florence, 1458–9; d Florence, 17 July 1497)

Painter, brother of (1) Domenico Ghirlandaio and (2) Davide Ghirlandaio. His birthdate is deduced from his father’s 1469 tax declaration, in which he is stated to be ten years old. The 1480 declaration says that Benedetto, now 22 years old, had given up working as an illuminator owing to trouble with his eyesight. He was admitted to the confraternity of S Paolo on 29 January 1479. According to Vasari, Benedetto spent many years in France, and documents confirm his presence there by the autumn of 1486. The one painting reasonably attributable to him is a panel of the Nativity (Aigueperse, Notre-Dame), inscribed with his name and an illegible date. The panel is painted in a thoroughly Frenchified version of Domenico Ghirlandaio’s style, in which the thin, stiffly drawn forms, reminiscent of Davide’s rather than Domenico’s work, are clad in a veneer of Flemish detail. Benedetto returned to Florence about the time of Domenico’s death. His participation in the decoration of the Tornabuoni Chapel in S Maria Novella, Florence, often posited, is therefore impossible.