LIPPI, FILIPPO. — Painter, born in Florence ca. 1406, died in Spoleto on 8 or 10 October 1469. He became a Carmelite in Florence, where he remained until 1432, except for brief trips to Pistoia, Siena, and Prato. He is first called a painter in a document of 1431. After 1432 he is found in Padua, working on paintings in the church of the Santo, now lost. But on 8 March 1437 he is again in Florence, where he establishes himself as an artist, although in a letter of 1438 he is described as one of the poorest friars in Florence. From those years date the Madonna of Tarquinia, the Coronation of the Virgin, now in the Uffizi, and the Annunciation for the church of the Murate, now in Munich. Alongside artistic recognition came religious appointments: a bull of 23 February 1442 appoints him rector for life of the church of S. Quirico at Legnaia; from 1450 he is chaplain to the nuns of S. Niccolò de’ Fieri in Florence itself.
LIPPI, FILIPPO — Annunciation — Rome, Museo di Palazzo Venezia.
On 29 May 1452 he undertakes, in place of Fra Angelico, who had refused the commission, the decoration of the choir of the pieve of Prato, with Stories of St. John and St. Stephen. The great pictorial enterprise, however, does not interrupt his activity as a painter of panels and devotional images: to the period in Prato belong, among other works, the Bartolini tondo, the Adorations of the Child for the Medici and for the convent of Annalena, the lunettes in the National Gallery in London, and the panel for the king of Naples.
In 1456, after becoming chaplain to the convent of S. Margherita in Prato, he was released from his vows; he then married Lucrezia Buti. Meanwhile, the work on the choir was proceeding so slowly that in November 1463 the city council of Prato resolved to compel Lippi to complete it within a short time; when this proved insufficient, in the following April it was decided to enlist the aid of Carlo de’ Medici to impose August as the deadline for the work. This is the last recorded information about Lippi’s activity in Prato.
In February 1466 the master was in Spoleto for the decoration of the apse of the Duomo. Even there the painter did not show excessive commitment: only in March of the following year were the scaffolding erected, and painting began in September. Despite an illness of Lippi, now elderly, the upper part of the apse, with the Coronation of the Virgin, was completed in the autumn of 1468. The master’s death did not interrupt the work, which was continued by the assistant Fra Diamante, who had already worked with Lippi in Prato, and was completed on 23 December 1469.
At that time, the tomb desired by Lorenzo the Magnificent and designed by his son Filippino was also erected in the Spoleto Duomo.
More than under Lorenzo Monaco, Lippi’s artistic training took place in the Carmelite convent itself, where before Masolino and Masaccio had worked Starnina. His earliest 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 Museo del Castello in Milan, representing the Madonna of Humility between angels, show him deeply influenced by the plastic and spatial researches of Masaccio, whose influence is still attested in works after the Paduan period, which, however, are distinguished by a more vivid taste for color and by the new significance assumed by line, which flows around the masses, flexible and as if isolated. Of this period, to be placed around 1434, when Lippi presumably followed Cosimo de’ Medici, his patron, into exile, a splendid example remains in the Madonna with Child, formerly in the Palazzo Vitelleschi in Tarquinia and now in the Galleria Borghese in Rome. But between 1442 and 1447 Lippi’s style approaches that of Fra Angelico (with the Annunciation in Palazzo Venezia in Rome; the Coronation of the Virgin in the Vatican Pinacoteca, the Annunciation in the Pinacoteca in Munich). This adherence of the forty-year-old painter to the style of his fellow citizen seems to correspond to a need for a more meditative, composed, and reflective kind of painting.
Lippi reaches the summit of his art in works where he expresses feelings of affectionate religious and domestic piety together, such as the Adorations of the Magi in Florence and Berlin, or the countless Madonnas with Child, in which the humanization of the sacred figures is joined by a deepening of psychological values and a lively, vibrant luminism, a delicate coloristic tonality. The images, after the angelic moment, are determined above all by that articulated and subtle line, perhaps close to Donatello’s drawing, which would become dear to Botticelli. In the large fresco works (the cathedrals of Prato and Spoleto), Lippi instead achieves a precise and unified sense of space, engaging in a monumental construction of the figure that would be admired by the artists of the sixteenth century, enriched by an easy narrative vein that anticipates the virtuosity of Ghirlandaio, and at least partially compensating for the weakness of dramatic representation. See pl. XCV.