Filippino Lippi

• 1. Introduction

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  Filippino Lippi was born probably in 1457 at Prato, Tuscany, under circumstances that would have seemed to doom him before he ever picked up a brush. His father was a painter who had also taken holy orders, and his mother was a nun. Both had broken their vows of celibacy. The couple received a papal dispensation to marry, arranged by Lorenzo di Medici himself, yet according to the biographer Vasari, they never went through with it. Filippino entered the world illegitimate, the son of a scandal.

  And yet when he died on the 18th of April 1504, aged forty-seven, every workshop in Florence closed its doors for a single day. That tribute was reserved for those the city considered irreplaceable.

  How does a child born in shame become an artist mourned by an entire city? What did Filippino Lippi make, and why did it matter? The answers run through the most powerful families in Italy, through a half-finished chapel left dark for decades, and through a style so strange and restless that one twentieth-century critic would call him the most modern spirit of all the Renaissance artists.

• 2. Father, Father's Pupil

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  Filippino first learned to paint inside his father's workshop, the only training ground he knew as a small child. When the family moved to Spoleto, he served as a workshop assistant while his father supervised the decoration of Spoleto Cathedral. Fra Filippo Lippi died in 1469, leaving his twelve-year-old son among the assistants who had to finish the frescoes known as the Storie della Vergine, the Life of the Virgin, in the cathedral.

  A boy who completes his dead father's commission has no ordinary apprenticeship ahead of him. Filippino was taken in by Botticelli, which carried a particular twist: Botticelli had himself been a pupil of Fra Filippo Lippi. The student of the father became the teacher of the son.

  By 1472, the records of the Painters' guild in Florence noted something unusual. Botticelli had only one assistant living in his house, and that assistant was Filippino Lippi. The two men worked so closely together that the paintings they produced in those years, many of them Madonna and Child panels, remain genuinely difficult to tell apart. Shared works from that partnership ended up scattered across the Louvre, the National Gallery of Canada, the Musee Conde in Chantilly, and the Galleria Pallavicini in Rome.

• 3. The Anonymous Friend

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  Filippino's earliest solo pictures were so close in feeling to Botticelli's that for years nobody put a name to them. The art historian Bernard Berenson solved the puzzle in 1899 by inventing a placeholder: he called the unknown painter "Amico di Sandro," meaning Friend of Botticelli. The term stuck for a generation.

  By about thirty years after Berenson coined it, his own revised lists had reassigned most of those paintings to Filippino Lippi. The anonymous friend had a name after all.

  Those earliest solo works, dating from 1475 onward, are what critics later characterised as resembling Botticelli but perhaps with less sensitivity and subtlety. That changed during the period 1480-1485, when Filippino's style grew more personal and more effective. Paintings from those years include the Madonna of the Sea now in the Galleria dell'Accademia in Florence, the Journeys of Tobia in the Galleria Sabauda in Turin, and Madonna panels now held in Berlin, London, and Washington, D.C. The commission that would prove how far he had come was already waiting.

• 4. Completing Masaccio

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  Around 1483-1484, Filippino was called to finish one of the most famous unfinished things in Italian painting. Masaccio, the towering figure of the early Renaissance, had left the Brancacci Chapel in the Santa Maria del Carmine in Florence incomplete when he died in 1428. The frescoes had stood unfinished for more than fifty years.

  Filippino painted the remaining scenes from the life of Saint Peter, including the Quarrel with Simon Magus in the presence of Nero, the Resurrection of the Son of Teophilus, Saint Peter Jailed, the Liberation, and the Crucifixion of Saint Peter. Matching the style of a dead master on walls that half of Florence already knew by heart would test anyone's nerve.

  He left one small personal mark. In the right-hand portion of the central panel, Filippino painted his own self-portrait at age twenty-five. He tucked himself into the scene as a witness, looking out from the fresco wall of a church he had helped complete decades after its painter died.

• 5. Strozzi, Savonarola, and the Long Commission

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  On the 21st of April 1487, Filippo Strozzi commissioned Filippino to decorate the Strozzi family chapel in Santa Maria Novella with scenes from the lives of Saint John the Evangelist and Saint Philip. It was a major assignment from one of Florence's most powerful banking families, and it consumed Filippino for the rest of his working life. He only completed the frescoes in 1503, after Strozzi himself had died.

  The windows with musical themes in the same chapel, also designed by Filippino, were finished between June and July 1503. What eventually emerged in those paintings carried the weight of a city in crisis. Scholars have noted that the theme Filippino chose, the clash between Christianity and Paganism, was at the center of heated religious and political debate in Florence, connected to the fiery preacher Girolamo Savonarola.

  Filippino's approach to that subject was anything but calm and orderly. He depicted ancient settings in fine archaeological detail, showing the influence of the Grottesco style he encountered in Rome. His figures move through landscapes that feel more like the logic of nightmares than the logic of daylight. Executioners wear grim faces. A statue of a pagan deity appears not as carved stone but as a living figure confronting Saint Philip. The windows completed in the summer of 1503 brought together music, classical ornament, and spiritual conflict in one of the last projects he would ever see finished.

• 6. Rome and Cardinal Carafa

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  In 1488, now in his early thirties, Filippino traveled to Rome at the recommendation of Lorenzo de' Medici. The commission waiting for him there came from Cardinal Oliviero Carafa, who wanted the family chapel in Santa Maria sopra Minerva decorated with frescoes. Filippino completed the series by 1493.

  The Rome frescoes show a shift in inspiration that critics have noted even as they confirm his continuing fascination with the classical world. Working in a city where ancient ruins were still being uncovered gave Filippino direct exposure to the Grottesco decorative style, the strange hybrid ornament of figures, foliage, and fantastical creatures found in ancient Roman interiors. That visual vocabulary would follow him back to Florence and into the Strozzi Chapel.

  He returned to Florence sometime between 1491 and 1494. Among the works he produced in the years that followed was the Adoration of the Magi of 1496, painted for the church of San Donato in Scopeto and now in the Uffizi, and the Sacrifice of Laocoön, made for Lorenzo de' Medici's villa at Poggio a Caiano toward the end of the century. In 1501 he traveled to Bologna to paint the Mystic Wedding of Saint Catherine for the Basilica of San Domenico.

• 7. The Apparition and the Final Work

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  Art critic Paul George Konody wrote that Filippino showed himself to be "the most subtle psychologist of his time, the most modern in spirit of all the artists of the Renaissance." One painting above all earned that reputation with the general public. The Apparition of the Virgin to Saint Bernard, dated to 1485-1487 and now in the Badia Fiorentina in Florence, became his most popular work during his lifetime and after.

  The painting pulls against every rule of stable composition. Its figures are notably elongated. The background presses in with rocks that look almost human and with trunks that seem to breathe. Piero di Francesco del Pugliese commissioned it as an altarpiece, and what he received was a vision structured according to the logic of the miraculous rather than the logic of the natural world.

  Filippino's last commission was the Deposition for the Santissima Annunziata church in Florence. He did not live to finish it. He died on the 18th of April 1504. Perugino, who had been a fellow pupil of Fra Filippo Lippi decades before, completed the panel in 1507. The Deposition now hangs in the Galleria dell'Accademia in Florence, measuring 333 by 218 centimeters, a final collaboration across death between two painters who had shared the same teacher.