St Lawrence
Domenico Ghirlandaio·1490
Historical Context
St Lawrence, painted around 1490 and held at the Bavarian State Painting Collections in Munich, depicts one of the most venerated early Christian martyrs—a Roman deacon executed in 258 CE by being roasted on a gridiron. Lawrence was associated with charitable giving—he had distributed the church's wealth to the poor before his arrest—and his martyrdom with its famous stoic joke ('Turn me over; I'm done on this side') made him a paradoxically cheerful subject in Christian iconography. Ghirlandaio's late treatment of the saint would have been made for an altarpiece or private devotional context.
Technical Analysis
Lawrence is typically identified by his deacon's dalmatic and the gridiron he carries as his attribute. Ghirlandaio's late style shows richer modelling and more ambitious spatial organisation than his earlier works, reflecting the influence of Flemish oil techniques as absorbed through Florentine workshop practice.
