The painting An Old Man and his Grandson by Domenico Ghirlandaio

My Story

There was once a very old man, who had a hammer nose. The old man had spent his last fifty-something years of heavy drinking along with his drunken friends. For the last five years he hadn’t had a drink. Not even a drop of any liquor. But why not?

Five years ago the old man’s daughter was carrying her first child in her stomach. The old man’s first grandchild. His daughter had not seen him in quite some time, after her mother had passed several years ago from a kidney disease. When the old man’s daughter came back to town she visited her father before doing anything else. Well except for visiting the church that was up the road on her way over. It took three knocks for her father to come to the door. And as soon as the old man had opened the door his daughter’s eyes flew right past him towards the kaleidoscope of different shapes and colors behind him. From the funnel-shaped snapshot that she took from where she stood, she could tell that the old man’s home was teeming with empty liquor bottles. At first she had second thoughts about entering her father’s home, the same place where she had grown up before she left to France at the age of fifteen. But she had prayed that he would have given up his life of drinking right at the church up the road before arriving.

His daughters name was Teresa. She wasn’t able to make it back when her mother had passed away. For years her father’s drinking habits terrorized their family when she was younger. Her little brother was trampled by a runaway horse in the market when she was five. After that incident, Teresa had no one to escape with when her father would beat their mother during the episodes of his drunken stupor. After that traumatic event her mother suffered with a men...

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...d ones. But down the winding road there is the opportunity to come closer with God and be saved, leaving you to live a happy and fruitful life. The realism in this painting is incredible. The exaggerated high contrast between light and dark really bring out the features of this old man. The grayed hair, wrinkles around his eyes and deformed nose. I feel that the difference between him and the child is highly relevant to the overall message depicting a long life of decisions compared to a new life just beginning.

Works Cited

Ghirlandaio, Domenico. Ritratto di nonno con nipote (An Old Man and his Grandson) ca. 1480

Louvre, Paris. Web. 3 Dec 2013.

Depagniat, Martine, and Dominique Thiébaut. "Work Old Man with a Young Boy." Old Man with a Young Boy. The Louvre, n.d. Web. 04 Dec. 2013. .