LIPPI, FILIPPO. - Painter, b. in Florence ca. 1406, d. in Spoleto on 8 or 10 Oct. 1469. He was a Carmelite in Florence, where he remained until 1432, except for brief journeys to Pistoia, Siena and Prato. He is called a painter for the first time in a document of 1431.
After 1432 he is found in Padua, for pictorial works in the church of the Santo, now lost. But on 8 March 1437 he is again recorded in Florence, where he established himself as an artist, although in a letter of 1438 he is described as one of the poorest friars of Florence. To those years belong the Madonna of Tarquinia, the Coronation of Mary, now in the Uffizi, and the Annunciata for the church of the Murate, now in Munich. Along with artistic recognition came religious appointments: a bull of 23 Feb. 1442 named him rector for life of the church of S. Quirico at Legnaia; from 1450 he was chaplain of the nuns of S. Niccolò de Fieri in Florence itself.
On 29 May 1452 he undertook, in place of Angelico, who had refused the commission, the decoration of the choir of the parish church of Prato, with Stories of St. John and St. Stephen. The great pictorial enterprise did not, however, interrupt his activity as a painter of panels and devotional images: to the Prato period belong, among other things, the Bartolini tondo, the Adorations of the Child for the Medici and for the convent of Annalena, the lunettes of the National Gallery in London, and the panel for the king of Naples.
In 1456, after becoming chaplain of the convent of S. Margherita in Prato, he was released from his vows; he then entered into marriage with Lucrezia Buti. Meanwhile the work on the choir proceeded so slowly that in Nov. 1463 the representatives of the city of Prato resolved to compel L. to finish it within a short time: this proving insufficient, in the following Apr. it was thought to interest Carlo de' Medici so that he might impose on L. the month of Aug. as the deadline for the work. This is the last piece of information on L.'s activity in Prato.
In Feb. 1466 the master is in Spoleto for the decoration of the apse of the Cathedral. There too the painter showed no excessive diligence: only in March of the following year were the scaffolds raised, and the frescoing began in the month of Sept. Despite an illness of L., by then old, the upper part of the apse, with the Coronation of the Virgin, was finished in the autumn of 1468. The master's death did not interrupt the work, which, continued by his assistant Fra Diamante, who had already worked at Prato with L., was completed on 23 Dec. 1469.
At that time the tomb commissioned by Lorenzo the Magnificent and designed by his son Filippino was also erected in the cathedral of Spoleto.
More than under Lorenzo Monaco, L.'s pictorial education took place in the Carmelite convent itself, where Starnina had worked before Masolino and Masaccio. L.'s first works, that is, what remains of the Confirmation of the Rule, frescoed in the cloister of the church, and the Trivulzio altarpiece, now in the Museum of the Castello in Milan, representing the Madonna of Humility among Angels, show him profoundly influenced by the plastic and spatial researches of Masaccio, whose influence is attested still by the works subsequent to the Paduan period, which nevertheless are distinguished by a more ardent taste for color and by the new meaning assumed by line, which runs around the masses, flexible and as it were isolated. From this period, to be placed around 1434, when L. presumably followed Cosimo de' Medici, his patron, into exile, a wonderful example remains in the Madonna and Child formerly in the Palazzo Vitelleschi at Tarquinia and currently in the Gallery of the Borghese Museum in Rome. But between 1442 and 1447 L.'s style approaches that of Angelico (with the Annunciation of Palazzo Venezia in Rome; the Coronation of Mary of the Vatican Pinacoteca, the Annunciation of the Pinacoteca of Munich). This adherence of the forty-year-old painter to the style of his fellow citizen seems to correspond to the need for a more meditated, composed and reflective painting.
L. reaches the summit of his art in the works where he expresses feelings of tender religious and at the same time domestic piety, such as the Adorations of the Magi of Florence and Berlin, or the innumerable Madonnas and Child, in which the humanization of the sacred figures is joined by a deepening of psychological values and a lively and vibrant luminism, a delicate coloristic tonality. The images, after the "Angelican moment," are determined above all by that articulated and subtle line, perhaps close to Donatello's drawing, which would be dear to Botticelli. In the great fresco works (cathedral of Prato and of Spoleto), L. instead achieves a precise and unified sense of space, engages in a monumental construction of the figure that would be admired by the sixteenth-century artists, enriched by an easy narrative vein that foreshadows the virtuosities of Ghirlandaio, and at least in part compensates for the weakness of the dramatic representations. - See pl. XCV.
Bibliography4 works
Eugenio Battisti