“Masterpieces in Colour” Series

FILIPPO LIPPI

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

[9]

I

IN Vasari’s gossipy Lives of the Painters,
and indeed in most art histories written
before the era of scientific critical research,
there is an inclination, in the absence of
documentary material, to reconstruct the
old masters’ characters and lives from the
evidence of their extant works. Many a[10]
charming legend, that was originally suggested
by the expression of the painter’s
personality in his art, and has been handed
down from generation to generation, had
to be shelved as dusty archives yielded new
knowledge of indisputable prosaic facts to
the diligent searcher. Whilst the serious
student owes a debt of deep gratitude to
those who devote their time and labour to
the investigation of documentary evidence,
and to establishing critical standards for
the sifting of the great masters’ works from
those of their followers and imitators, the
elimination of romance from the history of
art is a hindrance rather than a help to the
ordinary person who cares not a jot about
morphological characteristics, but loves
nevertheless to spend an hour now and then
in communion with the old masters. For
him, paradoxical though it may seem, there
is more significant truth in many an entirely[11]
fictitious anecdote, than in the dry facts
recorded by the conscientious historian.

Thus we know now that Domenico Veneziano
outlived Andrea dal Castagno by several
years, and could therefore not have been
foully murdered by his jealous rival. But
does not the fable of this act of violence, suggested
no doubt by the fierceness and rugged
strength of Andrea’s art, help the layman
to understand and appreciate the qualities
which constitute the greatness of that art?
We know now that Fra Angelico, far from
accounting it a sin to paint from the nude,
was an eager student of human anatomy;
but the stories told of his piety and angelic
sweetness have become so fused with everybody’s
conception of the Dominican friar’s
art, that even those to whom the spiritual
significance of art is a sealed book, search
almost instinctively for signs of religious
fervour and exaltation in Fra Angelico’s[12]
paintings. The stories of Sodoma’s habits
of life and of his strange doings at Mont’
Oliveto belong probably to the realm of
fiction, but they serve to explain and accentuate
the worldly tendencies of his artistic
achievement.

In these instances, to which many others
might easily be added, the artists’ personality
and manner of life have been fancifully
reconstructed from the character of their
work. Very different is the case of Fra
Filippo Lippi. Here criticism has seized
upon certain authentic facts of the Carmelite
friar’s life and amorous adventures—facts
that in their main current have been established
beyond the possibility of dispute, even
though they have been embroidered upon
by imaginative pens—and has dealt with
his art in the light of that knowledge,
reading into his paintings not only his
artistic emotions, but his personal desires[14]
and passions. Only thus can it be explained
that generation after generation of
writers on art have misconstrued the exquisite
and touching innocence and virgin
purity of his Madonna type into an expression
of sensuality. Again and again we read
about the pronounced worldliness of Fra
Filippo’s religious paintings, about their lack
of spiritual significance and devout feeling.

Vasari, of course, is the fountain-head
of this misconception of the Carmelite’s art.
According to the Aretine biographer, “it
was said that Fra Filippo was much addicted
to the pleasures of sense, insomuch
that he would give all he possessed to
secure the gratification of whatever inclination
might at the moment be predominant,
but if he could by no means accomplish
his wishes, he would then depict the object
which had attracted his attention in his
paintings, and endeavour by discoursing[16]
and reasoning with himself to diminish
the violence of his inclination. It was
known that, while occupied in the pursuit
of his pleasures, the works undertaken
by him received little or none of his
attention.”

It so happens that many of the discreditable
incidents of the friar’s life, recorded
by Vasari, have been confirmed by
documentary evidence. There is not a
shadow of doubt that Fra Filippo did
abduct the nun Lucrezia Buti from her convent;
that Filippino Lippi was the offspring
of this illicit union; and that the Frate subsequently
did not avail himself of the special
papal dispensation to wed the nun. There
is also abundant proof to show that Fra
Filippo, in spite of the high esteem in which
he was held as an artist, and which caused
him to be entrusted with many a remunerative
commission, was for ever in financial[17]
straits, was involved in many vexatious
law cases, attempted to cheat his own
assistants, and had no hesitation to break
faith with his patrons. But all this does
not affect his art. To read sensuality into
his types of womanhood can only be the
result of prejudice, of approaching his
pictures in the light of the knowledge
gathered from the pages of the chroniclers.
Worldly he is compared with the pure,
exalted spirituality of the Dominican Fra
Angelico, but only in so far as he belonged
already to the new era which had discovered,
and revelled in, the visible beauty
of this world of ours, whilst Fra Angelico,
his contemporary, still belongs to the earlier
age that looked to the empyrean for all
true happiness. The art of both masters
is planted in Gothic soil, though it bore
different fruit, that of Fra Angelico being
still essentially Gothic, though often tinged[18]
with a Renaissance flavour, whilst that of
Fra Filippo has all the richness and fullness
of the Renaissance, of which he was
one of the great initiators.

That such conceptions as the Virgin
in National Gallery “Annunciation,” or the
lovely Madonna in the tondo at the Palazzo
Pitti, and many other authentic works by
the master, are lacking in spirituality of
expression, cannot be seriously maintained
by anybody who approaches these pictures
with an open mind and judges the artist
by his achievement, not by his manner of
life. Even Mr. Berenson, the most authoritative
modern critic of Italian art, denies
Fra Filippo a “profound sense of either
material or spiritual significance—the essential
qualifications of the real artist,” although
he admits in the same essay1 that “his real[19]
place is with the genre painters, only his
genre was that of the soul, as that of
others—of Benozzo Gozzoli, for example—was
of the body.” Browning, with the true
poet’s intuition, states the case of Fra
Filippo more clearly than the vast majority
of professional critics from Vasari to the present
day, when he makes the friar exclaim:

II

Whereas all questions concerning Fra
Filippo’s artistic education remain largely[20]
a matter of conjecture and deduction, there
is no lack of documentary material for a
fairly accurate reconstruction of his life.
Vasari remains, of course, the basis for
any such attempt; but the archives of
Florence and Prato have yielded a rich
harvest of contemporary records, on the
strength of which it is possible to clear
up the contradictions and to correct the
numerous errors that have crept into
Vasari’s life of The Florentine Painter,
Fra Filippo Lippi.

Filippo was the son of Tommaso di
Lippo, a butcher in a poor quarter of
Florence, and of Mona Antonia di Bindo
Sernigi. None of the various dates given
in his wonted loose fashion by Vasari for
the birth of the artist, accords with
ascertainable facts, which point to the
years 1406 to 1409, with probability favouring
the earlier date. According to a document[21]
in the Archivio di Stato in Florence,
confirmed by an entry in the account books
of the convent of the Carmine, in which
“Philippus Tomasi” is stated to have received
his garments at the expense of that
establishment, Filippo took the habit in the
year 1421. There are no reasons to doubt
Milanesi’s well-reasoned suggestion that
the artist was fifteen years of age when
he took the vow—which would place the
year of his birth about 1406.

“By the death of his father,” continues
Vasari, “he was left a friendless orphan
at the age of two years, his mother having
also died shortly after his birth. The child
was for some time under the care of a
certain Mona Lapaccia, his aunt, the sister
of his father, who brought him up with
great difficulty till he had attained his
eighth year, when, being no longer able
to support the burden of his maintenance,[22]
she placed him in the convent of the
Carmelites.” Since, however, an income-tax
return, discovered by Milanesi, proves
Mona Antonia, Filippo’s mother, to have
been still alive in 1427, and apparently in
tolerably comfortable circumstances, this
account of Filippo’s sad childhood must
be relegated to the sphere of fiction.
Destined for the Church, he was presumably
at the age of eight placed with
the Carmelites to be prepared for his
vocation. That he showed no inclination
for book-learning and “manifested the
utmost dullness and incapacity in letters,”
and that he preferred to daub his and the
other boys’ books with caricatures, need
not be doubted, for his extant letters prove
him to have been strikingly illiterate even
for his days. Nor is Filippo the only
artist who evinced an early inclination for
the artistic profession in this manner.

[23]

[24]
And now Vasari loses himself in a
tangle of incorrect and contradictory assertions.
First, that the Brancacci Chapel
of the Carmine had “then” just been finished
by Masaccio, and so delighted the young
Carmelite that he “frequented it daily for
his recreation,” and so completely absorbed
Masaccio’s style “that many affirmed the
spirit of Masaccio to have entered the
body of Fra Filippo.” At this period he
painted several frescoes in the Carmine, and
one in terra verde in the cloister of that
church. As a result of the high praise
bestowed upon him for these early efforts,
“he formed his resolution at the age of
seventeen, and boldly threw off the clerical
habit.”

To begin with, the account books of the
Carmine show that Fra Filippo remained
at that monastic establishment at least
until 1431, when he was about twenty-five[26]
years of age. That even then he did not
throw off his clerical habit is clearly proved
by the fact that he subsequently held the
posts of abbot of S. Quirico a Legnaja, and
of chaplain to the nuns of Sta. Margherita
at Prato. Of the early frescoes recorded
by Vasari and other writers, every vestige
has disappeared, so that it is impossible to
trace through them the supposed direct or
indirect teaching of Masaccio. But there is
something wrong about the dates. Masaccio
wrought his Carmine frescoes between 1425
and 1427, so that his could not possibly
have been the earliest influence upon the
young monk’s impressionable mind. Nor
is there even a hint of Masaccio’s monumental
style in the earliest known works
by Filippo: the two “Nativities” in the
Florence Academy, and the “Annunciation”
in the Pinakothek in Munich. That Fra
Filippo, like all the masters of the Florentine[27]
Renaissance, was, in his later life,
powerfully influenced by the genius of
Masaccio, is only natural, and cannot be
doubted by anybody who has seen his frescoes
at Prato. For his earliest inspiration,
however, one has to look for other sources;
and modern criticism is pretty well agreed
upon this point, that the pictures painted
by the friar in his youthful years are based
on the trecento tradition, and that the
only late Giottesque who could have been
his master is the Camaldolese, Lorenzo
Monaco.

Lorenzo Monaco’s teaching, at any
rate, is suggested by Fra Filippo’s first
“Nativity” at the Florence Academy, which
suggests the methods of the school of
miniaturists in which Lorenzo had been
trained, although these tendencies are clearly
tempered by the influence of Masolino,
Masaccio’s precursor in the decoration of[28]
the Brancacci Chapel, and also of Fra
Angelico. Indeed, this “Nativity” was actually
for a long time attributed to Masolino.
Throughout his life, Fra Filippo, in his
steady advance from Giottism to such
triumphantly vital achievement as his Prato
frescoes, evinced the greatest eagerness to
absorb what was newest and best. No
doubt he watched Masolino at work at the
Carmine, and later on Masaccio, whose influence
clearly appears in Fra Filippo’s
mature work. But he also learnt from the
example of all the other masters who
wrought in and near Florence in the early
part of the fifteenth century. Sir Frederick
Cook’s tondo clearly shows the influence of
Gentile da Fabriano. Of Fra Angelico we
are reminded by the profound devotional
feeling and mystic intentness of his early
works. From Pier dei Franceschi he acquired
afterwards the feeling for atmospheric[29]
effects which was unknown to the
Giottesques, to Fra Angelico, and even to
Masaccio. Nor did he fail to study the
reliefs of Donatello, of which we are forcibly
reminded by the “Madonna and Child with
the laughing Angel” at the Uffizi. And
since Miss Mendelssohn has shown that
the dancing Salome in the Prato fresco is
practically copied from the figure of “Luna
descending from her Chariot” in the relief on
the Endymion sarcophagus, we have proof
that Lippi was also a student of the
antique.

The patronage which the powerful Medici
family, and especially Cosimo de’ Medici,
bestowed upon Fra Filippo Lippi, probably
dates back to the time when the friar was
still working within the walls of the Carmine.
The “Nativity” (No. 79) at the Florence
Academy was painted in the early thirties
of the fifteenth century for Cosimo’s wife,[30]
who commissioned it for the Camaldoli
hermitage. For Cosimo himself he painted
the two lunettes now in the National
Gallery: “The Annunciation” and “St. John
the Baptist with six other Saints,” which
were originally placed over two doors in
the Riccardi Palace. Other pictures by
their protégé were sent by members of
the Medici family as gifts to the King
of Naples and other Italian princes. And
there is no lack of documentary evidence
that the friar frequently petitioned members
of that powerful family for pecuniary or
other assistance, for his disorderly habits
of life brought him into many a scrape, and
resulted in constant financial stress. Thus
in a letter of August 13, 1439, to Piero de’
Medici, he describes himself as “one of the
poorest friars in Florence,” whom God left
to look after six unmarried, infirm, and
useless nieces. The object of the letter[31]
was to beg his patron to be supplied with
wine and corn on credit.

When Cosimo was banished from Florence
in 1433, and took up his residence at Padua,
he was accompanied by a small army of
courtiers and artists. It is very probable
that Fra Filippo was of their number.
Vasari’s brief reference to paintings executed
by the master in Padua is supported
by Filarete and the Anonimo Morelliano,
and may therefore be relied upon, although
every trace of these works has vanished.
There is nothing in the extant records of
the artist’s movements to make his presence
at Padua in 1433-4 appear impossible. On
the other hand, Vasari’s story of Filippo’s
capture by pirates on the coast of the
Marches of Ancona, his long-extended
captivity and final liberation by his master
whose favour he had gained by the excellence
of art, and his visit to Naples on[32]
the home journey, belongs to the realm
of fable.

In or before 1437, Fra Filippo was
certainly back in Florence, since the Deliberazioni
of the Company of Orsanmichele
show that in that year he was commissioned
to paint the great altarpiece of the
“Madonna and Child, with Angels and two
Abbots” for the Barbadori Chapel in Santo
Spirito, which is now one of the treasures
of the Louvre. It is this picture to which
Domenico Veneziano refers in a letter to
Piero de’ Medici, dated Perugia, April 1,
1438, asking to be entrusted with the commission
for an altarpiece, since “Fra
Filippo and Fra Giovanni have much work
to do, and especially Fra Filippo has a
panel for Santo Spirito which, should he
work day and night, will not be done in
five years, so great is the work.” Yet in
the following year we find him writing[34]
a begging letter to the same Piero de’
Medici.

There can be no doubt that the gay
friar led the life of a true “Bohemian”—that
he was fond of women and wine, and
wasted his substance in the company of
his boon companions. He spent his money
as rapidly as he earned it, and was therefore
in constant financial difficulties, which
involved him in no end of litigation. His
most prosperous years apparently began
in 1442, when, probably through Cosimo’s
intervention, Pope Eugene IV. made him
rector of the parish church of S. Quirico a
Legnaja, of which post he was deprived
by papal decree as a result of an action
brought against him by his assistant, Giovanni
da Rovezzano. Giovanni sued him for
the amount of forty florins due to him for
work done, and Fra Filippo did not shrink
from producing a forged receipt. To this[36]
at least he confessed on the rack “when
he saw his intestines protruding from his
wounds.” Whether much weight can be
attached to a confession obtained by such
means is another question, but there is
nothing in the career of Fra Filippo to
make such disgraceful conduct appear impossible.

An appeal to the Pope led to another investigation
of the case. The judgment of
the Curia was confirmed, the Pope referring
on this occasion to Fra Filippo as a painter
qui plurima et nefanda scelera perpetravit.
Nevertheless, some years later, our
artist is still mentioned as rettore e commendatario
di San Quirico a Legnaja.
From which it may be assumed that the
judgment deprived him merely of his spiritual
office, and left him in enjoyment of the
revenue connected with the post.

The ups and downs of Filippo Lippi’s[37]
career in the fifties of the fourteen-hundreds
are more than a little confusing. Of commissions
there was no lack. And certain
emoluments must have come to him from his
ecclesiastic appointments. His disgraceful
conduct towards Giovanni da Rovezzano,
and the notorious looseness of his morals—one
need only recall the well-known anecdote
of his escape through a window of the Medici
Palace in search of amorous adventure—did
not stand in the way of his being made
chaplain to the nuns of S. Niccolò de’ Fieri,
in 1450,2 and of Santa Margherita in Prato,
in 1456. He bought a little house at Prato
in 1452, and another in 1454. During this
whole period he had so much work on hand
that he was unable to fulfil his contracts,
which led to further unpleasant litigations.
Yet in 1454, as we learn from Neri di
Lorenzo di Bicci’s diaries, he found it advisable[38]
to deposit some gold-leaf with the
said Neri, in order to save it from seizure
by his creditors. On July 20, 1457, he writes
to Giovanni de’ Medici to ask for an advance
payment for work in hand—the same work,
presumably, over the execution of which he
was so tardy that Francesco Cantamanti had
to visit his studio daily to urge its completion
on behalf of his patron. In his report
to Giovanni de’ Medici, dated August 31,
1457, Cantamanti states that on the preceding
day Fra Filippo’s studio was seized by
his landlord for arrears of rent.

Meanwhile the Carmelite’s art had made
prodigious progress. Filippo Lippi, the pupil
of the last Giottesque, was now swimming
abreast of the mighty current of the Renaissance.
If his early Madonnas recall something
of the spirituality and naïve faith of
Fra Angelico, the altarpieces of his later
Florentine period, and, above all, the superb[40]
“Coronation of the Virgin,” painted for Sant’
Ambrogio, and now in the Florence Academy,
are inspired by the beauty of this visible
world. The atmosphere is of this earth, and
not of the celestial regions. His types are
no longer ethereal, but realistically robust.
In the “Coronation of the Virgin” he has
left us a portrait of himself at the age
of about forty, in the figure of the kneeling
monk on the left, towards whom an
angel raises a scroll with the lettering
IS PERFECIT OPUS. The features are
rather coarse and heavy, but scarcely express
that low sensuality which his biographers
have tried to read into them. The expression
of his eyes in particular is intelligent,
frank, and good-natured.

III

The Sant’ Ambrogio altarpiece must have
added enormously to the reputation which[42]
the Carmelite painter enjoyed among his
contemporaries. It was only natural that he
should have been chosen by the proposto
Gemignano Inghirami and by the magistrates
of Prato to undertake the fresco decoration
in the choir of the cathedral of that city,
when Fra Angelico, in spite of repeated
urging, refused to accept this important
commission, his time being fully occupied by
the completion of the series of frescoes at the
Vatican. In the spring of 1452, Fra Filippo,
accompanied by his assistant, Fra Diamante,
took up his abode at Prato, and entered
upon the most eventful and artistically the
most significant period of his career. As we
have seen, he still kept up his workshop in
Florence, where his temporary presence is
repeatedly testified by documentary evidence
during the next few years. Thus, although
he began to work in the choir chapel immediately
after his arrival at Prato, as may be[43]
seen from the entry in the Libra delle spese
in the Archivio del Patrimonio ecclesiastico
in Prato, recording under date of May 29,
1452, the payment of fifty lire to “Fra
Diamante di Feo da Terranuova, gharzone
di Fra Filippo di Tommaso,” his frequent
absence and general dilatoriness were the
cause of so much delay that the decoration
of the chapel was not completed before 1468,
a year before the master’s death.

During this period of sixteen years Fra
Filippo continued to be employed by the
members of the Medici family, by the proposto
Gemignano Inghirami, and by many
other patrons in Prato and Pistoja. In addition
to his frequent absence in Florence, he
no doubt undertook several other journeys,
of one of which at least we have certain
knowledge: his sojourn in 1461 at Perugia,
whither he was called to value Bonfigli’s
frescoes in the Palazzo del Comune—an[44]
honourable task which devolved upon him
as the sole survivor of the three artists
chosen for it by the Signory of Perugia,
the other two being Fra Angelico, who died
in 1455, and Domenico Veneziano, whose
death occurred in the spring of the very
year that witnessed the completion of
Bonfigli’s frescoes.

But quite apart from such interruptions
in the execution of that superb series of
frescoes at Prato, depicting scenes from
the lives of St. John the Baptist and
St. Stephen, as were due to professional
causes, there was enough excitement and
disturbance in the artist’s private life to
account at least in part for his tardiness
in completing the work which constitutes
his greatest claim to immortal fame. For
Prato was the scene of the great romance
of Fra Filippo’s life, by which his name
has become familiar even to those who[45]
know little of, and care less about, his
artistic achievement. The abduction of the
nun, Lucrezia Buti, by the amorous monk,
who was then entering upon the sixth
decade of his life, is on the whole correctly
recorded by Vasari, and has formed the
subject of many a literary romance and
pictorial rendering. Subsequent doubts
thrown upon it by such eminent critics
as, among others, Messrs. Crowe and
Cavalcaselle, who maintain that the story
rests upon the sole testimony of Vasari,
and that “contingent circumstances tend to
create considerable doubts of Vasari’s truth,”
almost succeeded in relegating the amorous
friar’s daring exploit into the realm of fiction,
until Milanesi’s researches established the
substantial truth of the romantic story. The
facts, briefly stated, are as follows:

On the death of the Florentine silk
merchant, Francesco Buti, in 1450, his son,[46]
Antonio, found himself charged with the
responsibility of a not too profitable business,
and a large family of twelve brothers
and sisters. The eldest of these sisters,
Margherita, was married off to Antonio Doffi
in 1451, and in the same year two other
sisters, Spinetta, born 1434, and Lucrezia,
born 1435, were placed with the nuns of
Sta. Margherita at Prato, Antonio paying
the required fee of fifty florins for each of
them. Needless to say, the two girls thus
committed to a living tomb at the very
time when life beckoned to them with all
its joys and seductions, were not consulted
in this matter any more than was Fra
Filippo when, as a mere child, he had to
enter the establishment of the Carmelites
in Florence. Presumably the two lively,
handsome girls had no more vocation for
the cloistral life than the pleasure-loving
friar—which circumstance may be pleaded[47]
in mitigation of the scandalous offence of
which they subsequently became guilty.

Whether Fra Filippo had become acquainted
with the Buti maidens before they
entered the nunnery of Sta. Margherita,
which was then in charge of the Abbess
Bartolommea de’ Bovacchiesi, it is impossible
to say. Certain it is, on the other
hand, that the Madonna of the Pitti tondo,
painted in 1452, already bears the features
of the model who, in other pictures, has
been identified as Lucrezia Buti. From
this it may be assumed that Fra Filippo,
who came to Prato only a year after the
two sisters, and who lived there in a house
opposite the convent of Sta. Margherita,
must have known Lucrezia at least four
years before she sat to him for the “Madonna
della Cintola” in 1456, the year of her abduction.
It is quite possible that the love-struck
monk used the influence of his powerful protectors[48]
to secure his appointment as chaplain
of Sta. Margherita, so as to facilitate intercourse
with the object of his affection and
desire. Nor did his by no means untainted reputation
and the papal stigma (qui plurima
et nefanda scelera perpetravit) stand in the
way of the coveted post being actually conferred
upon him in the year 1456.

In the same year, as soon as he had
entered upon his new duties, the Abbess
of Sta. Margherita commissioned the new
chaplain to paint an altarpiece for the high
altar of the convent church. This afforded
Fra Filippo a welcome opportunity for
carrying out what must have been a carefully
and cunningly devised scheme. He
begged the Abbess to allow Lucrezia Buti,
“who was exceedingly beautiful and graceful,”
to sit for the head of the Madonna;
and, having obtained this favour, presumably
did not fail to advance his cause. His[50]
clerical habit and the great difference
of age between the monk and the nun—he
was then about fifty, and Lucrezia
twenty-one—may have helped to disarm
suspicion: they did not prevent the young
nun from taking the fatal step which
was bound to bring disgrace and dishonour
upon her; which, indeed, was accounted a
crime, for Lucrezia was not, as Vasari has
it, “either a novice or a boarder,” but one
of the eight “choral and professed nuns”
who formed the establishment of Santa
Margherita.

The plot came to a successful issue on
the 1st of May 1456, during the celebration
of the feast of the Madonna della Cintola—Our
Lady of the Girdle. On that day it
was the custom to exhibit at the Cathedral
a sacred relic, purporting to be the miraculous
girdle given to St. Thomas by the
Virgin, who appeared to him after her[52]
death. That day was one of the rare occasions
when the nuns of Sta. Margherita
left the precincts of their convent to join
the worshippers in the Duomo. On May 1,
1456, there were eight nuns who set out
to pray before the sacred girdle—but seven
only returned to the convent. Lucrezia
Buti had been carried off by her monkish
lover to his house; and if any attempts
were made to induce her to return, either
to Sta. Margherita, or to her relatives in
Florence, she lent a deaf ear to these appeals.
Vasari relates that “the father of
Lucrezia was so grievously afflicted thereat,
that he never more recovered his cheerfulness,
and made every possible effort to
regain his child.” This, of course, is pure
invention, since Francesco Buti had been
mouldering in his grave for six years when
the abduction took place.

And now we come to the most amazing[53]
chapter of this fifteenth-century romance.
Fra Filippo Lippi, the monk who had
broken his vow and was openly living
at Prato with the equally guilty nun, actually
continued to administer to the spiritual
welfare of the nuns of the convent that had
been so irretrievably disgraced by his conduct!
That his misdeed was allowed to
pass unpunished and uncensured, may
have encouraged others to follow his and
Lucrezia’s example. Whether or not the
Carmelite was instrumental in helping the
other nuns to escape, the fact remains that
before long Spinetta Buti had joined her
sister in Filippo’s house, whilst three
other nuns deserted the convent to live in
illicit union with their lovers. The unfortunate
Abbess, Bartolommea de’ Bovacchiesi,
whose portrait is to be seen as kneeling
donor in the so-called “Madonna della
Cintola,” now in the Municipal Palace at[54]
Prato, died of shame and grief before the
year came to a close.

The remote resemblance of the figure of
St. Margaret, on the extreme left of that
picture, to Lucrezia Buti as she appears
in authentic works by the master, in addition
to the fact that the “Madonna della
Cintola” was originally in the church of
Sta. Margherita, has given colour to the
theory that this is the very altarpiece which
figures so prominently in the chief romance
of Filippo Lippi’s life. The same claim has
been advanced for the “Nativity” (No. 1343)
at the Louvre. Much as one would like to
identify either the one or the other with
the picture referred to by the chroniclers,
if only for the sentimental interest that
would be attached to it, neither of the two
can be accepted as authentic works by
our artist. The best recent expert opinion
has ascribed the Paris panel in turn to Fra[55]
Diamante, Pesellino, Stefano da Zevio, and
Baldovinetti, agreeing only on the one
point, that it cannot be by Fra Filippo.
As regards the “Madonna della Cintola,”
critical analysis of the picture can only
lead to the conviction that from beginning
to end it is inferior bottega work, with
never a trace of the master’s own brush,
although it may well be based on a design
by Fra Filippo. It is true, the time that
elapsed between the placing of the commission
for the Sta. Margherita altarpiece
and the abduction of Lucrezia was so
short, that the picture may have been
only just begun and left to be finished by
some other inferior painter. On the other
hand, there is no reason for this assumption,
since Filippo Lippo continued to be
connected with the convent in his capacity
of chaplain.

In the year following that memorable[56]
feast of the Sacred Girdle, Lucrezia presented
the friar with a son, who was to
become known to fame as Filippino Lippi.
The house in which he was born bears a
commemorative inscription put up by the
citizens of Prato in 1869:

FILIPPO LIPPI
COMPRÒ E ABITÒ QUESTA CASA
QUANDO COLORIVA GLI STUPENDI
AFFRESCHI DEL DUOMO
E QUÌ NACQUE NEL MCCCCLIX FILIPPINO
PRECURSORE DI RAFFAELLO

“Filippo Lippi bought and inhabited this
house when he painted the stupendous
frescoes of the Cathedral, and here was born
in 1459 (it should read 1457) Filippino, the
precursor of Raphael.”

If proof were needed that the escape of
the other nuns was closely connected with
the abduction of Lucrezia, it may be found
in the fact that, when Lucrezia, for some
unknown reason, found it advisable to feign[57]
repentance and to return to the convent of
Sta. Margherita at the end of 1458, all the
other fugitives followed her example. They
had to submit to the formality of twelve
months’ probation before they took the veil
again, in a solemn ceremony, in December
1459. Perhaps the reason for Lucrezia’s
return is not altogether dissociated from the
financial troubles that beset her lover, as we
have seen, about the time of Filippino’s birth.
The sincerity of her renewed vow of chastity
is to be gathered not only from the fact that in
1465 she presented Fra Filippo with another
child—a daughter, who was given the name
Alessandra—but in the clear indictment set
forth by an anonymous accuser in a tamburazione
under date of May 8, 1461. In this
tamburazione, or secret accusation, addressed
to the “officers of the night and
monasteries of the city of Florence,” a pretty
state of affairs is revealed at the convent[58]
of Sta. Margherita, which “has been frequented
and continues to be frequented by
Ser Piero d’Antonio di Ser Vannozzo,” who
has “begot a male child in the said convent….
And if you wish to find him, you will
find him every day in the convent, together
with another man called frate Filippo. The
latter excuses himself by saying that he is
the chaplain, whilst the former says he is the
procurator. And the said frate Filippo has
had a male child by one called Spinetta.
And he has in his house the said child, who
is grown up and is called Filippino.”

The anonymous accuser, of course, was
mistaken in mentioning Spinetta, instead of
her sister, as the mother of Filippino, who in
his will expressly refers to “domine Lucretie
ejus delicte matris et filie olim Francisci de
Butis de Florentia,” and thus removes every
possible doubt as to his parentage. The
mistake finds an easy explanation in the fact[60]
that both the sisters were for some time
under Fra Filippo’s roof.

What was the end of Lippi’s romance?
There are no contemporary records to throw
clear light upon it. In Milanesi’s edition of
Vasari it is stated that Pope Eugene granted
the monk a special dispensation to marry
Lucrezia. If any such dispensation ever
was granted, it must have been by Pius II.,
and not by Eugene. Under any circumstances,
it seems very improbable that Fra
Filippo, as we learn from the same source,
should have refused to avail himself of this
permission to legalise his union, because “he
preferred to continue living the sort of life
that pleased him.” He was then a man of
considerable age, near the end of his life, and
past the times for “sowing his wild oats.”
The papal dispensation, if actually given,
must have been sought for, in which case
Filippo would presumably have availed himself[62]
of it; or, if granted on the Pope’s own
initiative, could not have been lightly set
aside by a humble member of the Church,
who was largely dependent on the emoluments
accruing from his clerical appointments.
The mere fact that Lucrezia’s
features are to be recognised in the friar’s
latest works, the frescoes in the Cathedral of
Spoleto, tends to prove that the old man’s
affection was not transferred to different
quarters; and Vasari’s suggestion that his
death was due to the libertinism of his
conduct, which led to his being poisoned by
certain relatives of a woman with whom he
had become entangled, may be dismissed as
a fable.

Vasari is at fault again in ascribing the
commission for the decoration of the chapel
in the Church of Our Lady at Spoleto, Fra
Filippo’s last important work, to the influence
of Cosimo de’ Medici. Fra Filippo[63]
went to Spoleto in 1467, and Cosimo had
been buried in 1464. If any member of the
Medici family had acted as mediator, it
must have been Piero, who had always
been a patron and protector of our artist.
Of the four frescoes at Spoleto illustrating
the Life of the Virgin, only the “Coronation”
and the “Annunciation” are, so far as one
can judge in their much restored condition,
from the master’s own hand. “The Death
of the Virgin” and the “Nativity,” though
undoubtedly designed by him, are vastly
inferior in execution, and are almost entirely
the work of his assistant, Fra Diamante,
who accompanied him to Spoleto, and stayed
there several months after his master’s
death to complete the unfinished work.

Fra Filippo died on the 9th of October
1469, and left his son Filippino under the
guardianship of Fra Diamante. He was
buried in the church which had witnessed[64]
his last labours. The esteem in which he
was held by those who knew how to appreciate
his art—and among them, surely,
the Medici must be placed at the top—found
expression in the rivalry between
Florence and Spoleto over his remains.
When Lorenzo the Magnificent, some years
after the great Carmelite’s death, passed
through Spoleto as ambassador of the
Florentine Commonwealth, he demanded Fra
Filippo’s body from the Spoletans, for re-interment
in the Duomo of Florence. The
Spoletans’ reply is characteristic of the
spirit of the age: they begged to be left
in possession of the remains of the master,
since they were so poorly provided with
distinguished men, whereas Florence had
enough and to spare. Lorenzo must have
been touched by a request presented in such
flattering terms, for he not only allowed
Filippo Lippi’s body to remain in its original[65]
resting-place, but he commissioned from
Filippino Lippi, the inheritor of the monk’s
artistic genius, a marble tomb, on which
can be seen to this day the jovial features
of the master thus honoured, the arms of
Lorenzo and of the Lippi, and the commemorative
inscription composed by the
great humanist, Angelo Poliziano.

[66]

IV

It is not within the scope of this brief
sketch of the life and art of Fra Filippo
Lippi to enter into a detailed critical discussion
of his extant works. I am not
here concerned with questions of debatable
attributions, or with the share that Fra
Diamante and other assistants or pupils
may have had in the execution of works
that pass generally under his name. All
that can here be attempted is, to gather
from the cumulative evidence of the pictures
that are unquestionably by the master’s own
hand, the real significance of his great
achievement and the place he occupies in
the evolution of Italian art. In the progress
of his style from the early “Nativities” to the
Prato frescoes is reflected the whole course
of Early Renaissance art from Gothic awkwardness
to full freedom. Of course, Fra[67]
Filippo lived in a period of transition and
of passionate striving for expression; and
to a certain extent every artist is the product
of the spirit of his time. The tendencies
which resulted in the full blossoming of
Renaissance art were at work, and would,
no doubt, have conquered in the end, even
if Filippo Lippi had never existed. Nevertheless,
he was one of the greatest initiators
of the Renaissance in painting; and it is
his peculiar merit that, at a period of artistic
pupilage, when every painter’s training was
directed towards the close assimilation of
his particular master’s peculiarities, and
when progress consisted largely in the
grafting of some personal note or other on
to the inherited tradition, Fra Filippo not
only liberated himself from the narrow confines
of his early training by his readiness
to benefit from the example of any native
or “foreign” master who had added some[68]
new word to the language of art, but he
was also ever ready to learn direct from
the greatest source of artistic inspiration—from
Nature.

From his earliest beginnings, which rather
suggest illuminated miniatures on a large
scale, we see him grow step by step, acquire
knowledge of perspective, of design, of colour
harmonies, of the effect of light and atmosphere,
of movement. We find him initiating
advance in many directions. The circular
composition, which was scarcely known before
his days, is carried by him to such perfection,
that it becomes the favourite device
of most later Florentine painters. He is the
first Florentine who shows a real appreciation
of the beauty of Nature, who allows real
daylight to enter into his pictures, and who
studies reflections. The Florentine School
was never a school of painters in the strict
sense of the word, like the Venetian School.[70]
Its work was always based on linear design,
upon which colour was superadded—an
afterthought, as it were. The Florentine
did not think in terms of colour. But Fra
Filippo, without abandoning the essentially
Florentine insistence on linear design, came
nearer the true pictorial conception than
any of his contemporaries or successors.
In his first “Nativity” at the Florentine
Academy he gives not the slightest hint
of the astounding development his art was
to undergo before he left Florence for Prato.
The colour is purely localised, like the flat
tones of the Gothic miniaturists in whose
school he had been trained. The Madonna
looks as if she were cut out and pasted on to
the landscape. What a step from its hard
delineation to the morbidezza, and the cool
shimmering tones and all-pervading sense
of atmosphere in his “Coronation of the
Virgin,” which, in this respect, remains a[72]
unique achievement in Florentine art. Both
his Florentine “Nativities” are as awkward
and clumsy in design as could be. Lopped-off
figures of praying monks are squeezed
into the extreme corners; the landscape
background is seen in steep perspective,
almost as in a bird’s-eye view, and has no
relation to the figures in the foreground; the
perspective and the whole arrangement of
the ruined building in the one are childish.
And a few years later he had arrived at the
noble architectonic design of the “Virgin
Enthroned,” at the Louvre, in which, notwithstanding
here and there a reminiscence
of Gothic awkwardness, the figure of the
angel on the left foreshadows the easy grace
of similarly poised figures in Andrea del
Sarto’s art.

Again and again Fra Filippo acts as
initiator and sets the fashion for whole
generations of artists. He is one of the[73]
first to experiment with devices for producing
the illusion of depth, either by the interpolation,
between the foreground and the background
figures, of architectural elements, as
in the Louvre “Madonna”—the idea had
already served Donatello in the sister-art
of sculpture—or by the skilful disposition
and lighting of the subsidiary figures in the
background, as in the episodes from the life
of St. Anne, which form the setting to the
adorable “Madonna and Child” of the Pitti
tondo. If Michelangelo’s nude athletes in
the background of his “Holy Family” tondo
are based upon the similar figures in Luca
Signorelli’s circular “Madonna and Child” at
the Uffizi, Signorelli himself clearly derived
from Filippo Lippi the use of the background
figures, one of whom turns his back to the
spectator just like the women on the extreme
right of Lippi’s tondo, for the purpose of
enhancing the sense of depth and space.[74]
This woman with the boy clinging to the
folds of her dress, as well as the one by
whom she is preceded—a rapidly moving
figure, with clinging diaphanous garments
and with a basket poised on her head—will
be found again and again during the next
half-century of Florentine art, just as the
Uffizi “Madonna adoring the Divine Child,”
who is supported by two boy-angels, became
the prototype of a long succession of similar
pictures. In the dancing “Salome” of the
Prato frescoes, again, we have the forerunner
of the type of figure and movement that
received its highest development in the art
of Botticelli, Filippo Lippi’s greatest pupil.

Every phase of the triumphant progress
of Renaissance art finds an echo in Filippo
Lippi’s painting. Masaccio helped him
to shake off Gothic awkwardness and to
achieve a certain degree of statuesque
dignity. From Gentile da Fabriano he[75]
took the delight in gay, festive attire and
sumptuous pageantry, which is clearly expressed
in Sir Frederick Cook’s tondo,
and in a modified form in the Academy
“Coronation.” Pier dei Franceschi’s great
conquest of the realm of light and air did
no more fail to leave its mark upon the
Carmelite’s art, than did Paolo Uccello’s
discoveries in the science of perspective.
The classic thrones of his Madonnas and
the architectural backgrounds of some of
his pictures proclaim his enthusiasm for
the forms and decorative details of the
Renaissance churches and palaces that
were then rising, under the influence of the
new learning, in every part of Florence.
Nor is it possible to over-estimate the prodigious
effect produced upon the artist-monk’s
receptive mind by his study of the
works of Donatello. The Uffizi “Madonna”
is in reality a relief by Donatello or one[76]
of his followers translated into paint.
Take any photographic reproduction of that
picture, and examine the head of the
roguishly smiling angel, the arms of the
Infant Saviour and of the Madonna, and
the way the whole group is set against
the window-frame. The illusion is extraordinary.
If it were not for the landscape
seen through the opening in the background
and the transparent folds of the
veil over the Virgin’s head, it would be
pardonable to mistake the picture thus reduced
to black and white for a bas-relief of
the Donatello School.

Thus, with the shrewd intelligence of
which his features in the auto-portrait introduced
into the “Coronation” are so
eloquent, Fra Filippo knew how to take
hints and suggestions from the art of all
his great contemporaries. But he applied
the same keen intelligence to the study of[77]
the living world around him. The knowledge
imparted to him by other masters
was thus allowed to filter through his
personal observation of Nature. And whilst
it is possible to trace in his work the most
varied artistic influences, his own personality
was never eclipsed or obscured.
Always ready to learn and to assimilate
new principles, he never stooped to the
imitation of mere mannerisms. From any
such inclination he was saved by his temperament,
his human sympathy, his artistic
curiosity. Only to his earliest Madonnas
cling reminiscences of Giottesque types
and formulas. Even before he had reached
full maturity, the typical had become
ousted by the individual. And in this respect
he was again an initiator in Florentine
art. He was one of the first painters
of his school who makes us feel that
almost every character in his pictures is[78]
the result of personal observation—is practically
a portrait. He is the first true genre
painter of his school. Benozzo Gozzoli, it
is true, went far beyond him as a pictorial
raconteur of Florentine fifteenth-century
life; but the origin of Benozzo’s genre-like
treatment of scriptural incidents, which
makes his frescoes at Pisa and San Gimignano
such precious documents, is to be
found in Fra Filippo Lippi.

The Prato frescoes introduce several
delicious incidents of this nature, like the
leave-taking of St. John from his parents,
or the child-birth scene in the episode in
the life of St. Stephen. But they are not
absent either from his altarpieces. The exquisitely
recorded happenings in the house
of St. Anne, which form the background of
the Pitti “Madonna and Child,” are pure
genre-painting, and are, moreover, a daring
departure from all the earlier conventions[79]
which ruled the rendering of this favourite
subject. The earlier “Coronation of the
Virgin” shows something of the same
tendency in the charming group of a female
saint and two children in front of the
kneeling monk. The saint, like the Virgin
Mary herself, is just an elegantly attired
Florentine lady of the period. The very
angels surrounding the throne of the
Heavenly Father are humanised, as it
were, by being divested of their wings.
Even in the stately and formal “Virgin
Enthroned,” at the Louvre, Fra Filippo
could not resist the temptation to introduce
a roguish urchin on each side peeping over
the balustrade, and thus transferring the
scene from the heavenly region to this earth.

Fra Filippo loved the world in which
he found so much beauty. For all that,
his art reveals neither sensuality nor worldliness.
He was indeed, as Mr. Berenson[80]
so happily describes him, a genre-painter,
whose genre was that of the soul, as that
of others was of the body. But he expressed
the soul through the body. As M.
André Maurel has it: “Before painting
faces, he looked at them, which was a new
thing…. He was a great painter, because
he was a man.”

The plates are printed by Bemrose & Sons, Ltd., Derby and London
The text at the Ballantyne Press, Edinburgh