Un vieillard et son petit-fils

Ghirlandaio painted this in Florence around 1490, near the end of his life, and he did something unusual for his time. He painted an old man honestly. The man's nose is swollen and lumpy with a skin condition doctors now call rhinophyma, rendered so precisely that medical textbooks still reproduce it. The thinking of the day held that an ugly face meant an ugly soul. Ghirlandaio refuses that. A small boy in red leans into the old man's chest and looks up at him, one hand resting there, and the man looks back down with plain tenderness. Through the window at the right a little road winds off into the hills. The disease is on his face, but everything about how the two of them hold each other tells you what kind of man he is.