Fra Filippo Lippi, Florentine painter in the second generation of Renaissance artists.
While exhibiting the strong influence of Masaccio (e.g., in Madonna and Child, 1437) and Fra Angelico** (e.g., in Coronation of the Virgin, c. 1445), 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, 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 by the Moors on the Adriatic, held as a slave for 18 months, and then freed after he painted a portrait of his owner.
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.
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 of 1437, immediately after he returned from Padua: The Virgin and Child Between SS. Frediano and Augustin 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, rendered more evident by lines, so that it resembles the reliefs of the sculptors Donatello** and Jacopo della Quercia.
In these works, the colour 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, once believed to be a late work but now dated between 1441-1443. It is composed in a new way, using the newly discovered effects of perspective and skillful contrasts between colour 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.
The altarpieces are characterized by a solemnity of composition that is absent from the paintings in which he 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 Mary, 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 1445, 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.
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 1456-1458 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 centre 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 centre 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.
- Assessment
Posthumous judgments of Filippo Lippi were often coloured by the traditions of his adventurous life. Moreover, his works have been criticized from time to time for their borrowings from other painters; nevertheless, it has also been recognized that his art was not diminished but rather enriched and rendered more balanced by what he took from Masaccio** and Fra Angelico**. He was constantly seeking the techniques to realize his artistic vision and the new ideas that made him one of the most appreciated artists of his time.
The 20th-century critic Bernard Berenson, who maintained that Lippi’s true place as an artist was among the “painters of genius,” also described him as “a high-class illustrator”, intending by this to underline the importance of expressive content and the presentation of reality in his works.
Later critics have recognized in Lippi a “narrative” spirit that reflected the life of his time and translated into everyday terms the ideals of the early Renaissance. | © Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Filippo Lippi, detto fra Filippo - Pittore (Firenze 1406 circa - Spoleto 1469). Personalità inquieta, divisa tra passioni e condizione di religioso, compì un percorso artistico improntato a una continua e felice sperimentazione delle grandi novità elaborate in quel periodo a Firenze: dalla lezione masaccesca alla sapiente spazialità prospettica, ai valori di luce e di colore dell'Angelico. Tra le sue opere più significative si ricordano l'Incoronazione della Vergine (1441-1447 circa).
- Vita
Di famiglia povera entrò molto presto nel convento del Carmine a Firenze, dove pronunciò i voti nel 1421; nella chiesa del convento fiorentino poté con continuità osservare all'opera Masaccio e Masolino da Panicale, intenti, tra il 1424-1428 circa, alla decorazione della cappella Brancacci.
Nel 1428 Lippi si trasferì temporaneamente nel monastero carmelitano di Siena, dove rimase per circa un anno con la carica di sottopriore, avendo così l'opportunità di conoscere in profondità le testimonianze dell'arte locale sia pittorica, sia scultorea.
Al principio del 1456 il Lippi fu nominato cappellano del convento di S. Margherita a Prato, dove conobbe Lucrezia Buti, di cui si innamorò e che convinse a fuggire con lui. Dalla loro unione illegittima nel 1457 nacque segretamente a Prato il figlio Filippino. Accusati entrambi da una denuncia anonima, nella quale veniva svelata anche la nascita del figlio, furono infine sciolti dai voti e uniti legittimamente in matrimonio.
- Opere
Al periodo giovanile, dominato dall'influsso di Masaccio, appartengono la Madonna dell'Umiltà (Milano, museo del Castello Sforzesco); i resti di un grande affresco nel chiostro del Carmine a Firenze; la Madonna (1437; Galleria nazionale d'arte antica di Roma, già a Tarquinia), in cui Lippi afferma un temperamento suo, nel definire i contorni, e nei guizzi di luce che attenuano la stabilità del rilievo; l'Annunciazione, in S. Lorenzo a Firenze.
La pala Barbadori per S. Spirito del 1437 (ora al Louvre), mostra in crescente sviluppo i caratteri particolari del maestro: giochi di chiaro e d'ombra danno alla modellazione movimento piuttosto che consistenza, il colore è toccato di una luce dolce, perlacea, e nella predella (Uffizi), certo dipinta per ultima, sulla forma e sul colore il disegno è accentuato con tanta evidenza di linee da diventare il mezzo più vivace per esprimere il moto, che in qualche figura ha ritmo impetuoso. Nella pala di S. Croce (Uffizi), nella festosa Incoronazione della Vergine (Uffizi), Lippi va subordinando sempre più le impressioni plastiche a quelle di movimento.
Gli affreschi del coro del duomo di Prato, Evangelisti, Storie del Battista e di s. Stefano (1464 e oltre), mostrano le stesse qualità che invece appaiono assai meno pure nell'ultima grande opera, in gran parte compiuta dai suoi collaboratori, fra Diamante e Pier Matteo d'Amelia: gli affreschi dell'abside del duomo di Spoleto (1467-69).
Di discussa cronologia sono la delicatissima Madonna con angeli (Uffizi) e le varie versioni dell'Adorazione del Bambino (Uffizi; Berlino, Gemäldegalerie); inoltre non poche sono le opere uscite dalla bottega di Lippi, forse ideate da lui, ma in parte o in tutto eseguite dai suoi allievi.| © Treccani
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