Fra Filippo Lippi

Fra Filippo Lippi (born c. 1406, Florence [Italy]—died October 8/10, 1469, Spoleto, Papal States) was a Florentine painter in the second generation of Renaissance artists. While exhibiting the strong influence of Masaccio (e.g., in Madonna and Child [c. 1440]) and Fra Angelico (e.g., in Coronation of the Virgin, c. 1439–47), his work achieved a distinctive clarity of expression. Legend and tradition surround his unconventional life.

Life and works

Filippo Lippi was born into a very large and poor family in Florence. After the death of both his father and mother, the young Filippo was raised by an aunt for some years; later she placed him with his brother in the convent of Carmelite monks at Santa Maria del Carmine. The Brancacci chapel of the monastery was at that time being decorated with frescoes by Masaccio. These frescoes (c. 1423–27), which were to be among the most glorious and influential paintings of the Renaissance, were Lippi’s first important contact with art.

In 1432 Lippi left the monastery after having painted some frescoes in the church and in the cloister. According to the Renaissance biographer Giorgio Vasari, who wrote a lively and fanciful profile of the painter, Lippi was abducted with some companions on the Adriatic, was enslaved for 18 months, and then freed after he painted a portrait of his enslaver. It is known that in 1434 the artist was at Padua. None of the works executed while he was at Padua are known, but the effect of his presence may be recognized in the paintings of others there, such as Andrea Mantegna.

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In 1437 Lippi returned to Florence, protected by the powerful Medici family, and was commissioned to execute several works for convents and churches. The qualities he acquired during his years of travel are affirmed with clarity in two works executed soon after he returned from Padua: The Virgin and Child Surrounded by Angels, by Saint Frediano and Saint Augustine (1437; called the Barbadori Altarpiece) and the Madonna and Child. In both of these altarpieces, the influence of Masaccio is still evident, but it is absorbed into a different style, having the pictorial effect of bas-relief (or low relief), rendered more evident by lines, so that it resembles the reliefs of the sculptors Donatello and Jacopo della Quercia. In these works, the color is warm, toned down with shadings, approaching the limpid chromatics of his great contemporary Fra Angelico. Still further testimony to Lippi’s development is the Annunciation and Two Donors, once believed to be a late work but now dated c. 1440. It is composed in a new way, using the newly discovered effects of perspective and skillful contrasts between color and form; the suggested movement of the light garments of the two frightened girls at the door is rendered with such sensitivity as to anticipate Sandro Botticelli.

A famous altarpiece of the same time, Lippi’s well-known Coronation of the Virgin is a complex work crowded with figures. The celebrated altarpiece is exquisitely sumptuous in appearance and marks a historic point in Florentine painting in its success in uniting as one scene the various panels of a polyptych.

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The altarpieces are characterized by a solemnity of composition that is absent from the paintings in which Lippi developed a typical motif of 15th-century Florentine art: the Madonna with the Child at her breast. The masterpiece of these is Madonna with Child and Scenes from the Life of St. Anne (c. 1452–53), a circular painting now in the Pitti Palace in Florence; it is a clear and realistic mirror of life, transfigured in a most intimate way, and it had a great effect on Renaissance art.

A second Coronation of the Virgin, executed about 1444, displays a marked change in the style of Lippi—from the plastic values suggested by his study of Masaccio to the serene chromatics of Angelico.

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In 1442 Lippi had been made rector of the church of San Quirico at Legnaia. His life, however, became constantly more eventful, and tradition has given him the reputation (borne out in great part by documents) of a man dominated by love affairs and impatient of methodical or tranquil conduct. His adventures culminated in 1456 in his romantic flight from Prato—where he was painting in the convent of the nuns of Santa Margherita—with a young nun of the convent, Lucrezia Buti. From 1456 to 1458 Lippi lived with Lucrezia, her sister, and a few other nuns. Lippi’s conduct, together with his apparent inability to fulfill contracts in time, got him in trouble. He was arrested, tried, and tortured. It was only thanks to the intervention of Cosimo de’ Medici that Lippi was released and allowed to renounce his vows. The pope later gave permission for the former priest-painter and the nun to marry, and from this union was born a son, Filippo, called Filippino, who was to be one of the most noted Florentine painters of the second half of the 15th century.

The bright and active city of Prato, a short distance from Florence, was the second home of Filippo Lippi. He returned to Prato often, staying there for long periods, painting frescoes and altarpieces. Accompanied by Fra Diamante, who had been his companion and collaborator since he was a young man, Lippi began to redecorate the walls of the choir of the cathedral there in 1452. He returned in 1463 and again in 1464, remaining in the city this time until 1467. At the center of his activity in Prato stand the frescoes in the chancel of the cathedral, with the four Evangelists and scenes from the lives of St. John the Baptist and St. Stephen. Perhaps the most solemn scene of the life and death of St. Stephen is the burial; at the sides of the funeral bed of the saint stand a crowd of prelates and illustrious persons in mourning, among them Cardinal Carlo de’ Medici, Fra Diamante, and the artist himself.

In 1467 Lippi, his son Filippino, and Fra Diamante left for Spoleto, where Lippi had received a commission for another vast undertaking: the decorations and frescoes of the choir of the cathedral, which included the Nativity, the Annunciation, the Death of Mary, and—in the center of the vault of the apse—the Coronation. These frescoes were Lippi’s final work; they were interrupted by his death, for which there are two documented dates—in the monks’ necrology of Santa Maria del Carmine in Florence and in the archives of Spoleto. Later the Medici had a splendid sepulchre, designed by Lippi’s son, erected for him (1490) in the cathedral of Spoleto.