MEMMI, LIPPO (LIPPO DA SIENA). – Sienese painter, son of Memmo di Filippuccio, also a painter, MARTINO V, PAPA (v.), mentioned and documented between 1317 and 1347.
In 1317, on a wall of the Palazzo comunale of S. Gemignano, he executed the fresco of the Maestà, which had been entrusted to his father, taking inspiration from Simone Martini’s analogous composition, but weighing down its features, in the transcription of the details, with a soft and opaque chiaroscuro and a monotonous, drowsy typology. Similar characteristics, accompanied by a diligent and polished coloration, distinguish the few panels bearing his name, such as the Madonna in the church of S. Maria dei Servi in Siena and that in the Berlin Museum. Finer and livelier, certainly through the influence of Simone Martini, his style appears in the parts attributable to him in the triptych of the Annunciation in the Uffizi (1333), signed by him and by the leading Sienese master: the prophets in the roundels of the frame (cf. payments of 1333) and, in all likelihood, also the lateral figures of SS. Quirico and Giulitta. Within these stylistic limits may be summed up the activity of L. M., which chronologically extends at least to 1347: lost frescoes in S. Francesco at Avignon. It was so thoroughly absorbed within the sphere of the master’s overwhelming personality that identifying his contribution in those parts of Simone’s works in Pisa, at Orvieto (polyptychs), and at Assisi (frescoes in the lower church), where inequalities of quality and slight stylistic divergences suggest collaboration, is exceedingly difficult. As for other works, such as the Madonna of Palazzo Venezia and the S. Gregorio of the Parry Collection in Gloucester, their heterogeneous characteristics have recently led critics to remove them from L. M. and assign them to anonymous artists of that circle.