Lippi, Filippo (1406-1469) 
- Name:
- Filippo Lippi
- Dates:
-
Firenze, circa 1406 – Spoleto, 1469
- Attività:
-
Painter
- Places:
- Florence, Prato, Spoleto
- Biographical information:
-
Of humble origins, and having remained an orphan, in 1421 Filippo took vows at the convent of Santa Maria del Carmine in Florence, close to where he had lived with his family.
Thus the young friar was able to admire the frescoes which, in the course of the 1420s, Masolino and Masaccio were painting in the Brancacci chapel, in the church annexed to the Carmelite convent. This was a decisive experience in the formation of Lippi, to the extent that "many said that the spirit of Masaccio had entered into the body of Filippo" (Vasari 1568). Inspired by such influences, he frescoed in the cloister of the convent an expansive scene portraying the Confirmation of the Carmelite Rule, normally identified with the detached fresco that is still conserved there.
Having left the convent, in 1434 Lippi lived for a while in Padua, which represented a fundamental experience in his artistic maturing, marked by the encounter with the archaeological interests of local culture and probably also with Flemish art. From Donatello, instead, he derived a lively interest in perspective and a tender plasticism, the latter filtered by the interpretations of Luca della Robbia pervaded by gentle naturalism. At the end of the 1430s Lippi opened his own workshop in Florence, where he immediately proved to be greatly appreciated. In a letter dated 1 April 1438 addressed to Piero de' Medici, Domenico Veneziano mentions Filippo Lippi and Fra Angelico as the best painters of the time.
Filippo executed paintings on religious subjects latent with elegant symbolism: the most recurrent themes were the Pietà, the Annunciation and the Adoration of the Child. He also painted portraits, devising a formula that was to be taken up again in later decades. From the 40s on Lippi evolved a more courtly style, with brighter and more glazed colours and more complex and airy settings, in harmony with the more demanding commissions of this period, mostly advanced by the Medici and their affiliates. For Cosimo il Vecchio he painted the altarpiece portraying the Adoration of the Child for the altar of the chapel of Palazzo Medici (before 1459).
Between 1452 and 1466, Lippi devoted himself to his most ambitious enterprise: the frescoes showing Scenes from the Lives of Saint Stephen and John the Baptist in the choir of the cathedral of Prato. During his sojourn in Prato he became sentimentally involved with Lucrezia Buti, a nun in the convent of Santa Margherita. Through the intervention of Cosimo de' Medici with Pope Pius II, who granted both Filippo and Lucrezia release from their monastic vows, the couple was able to marry. They gave birth to a son, Filippino, who followed in his father's footsteps and became an important artist.
In 1467, Filippo Lippi moved to Spoleto together with his workshop, having been commissioned to fresco Scenes from the Life of the Virgin in the apse of the cathedral. He worked on these up to his death in October 1469. Later, in the Duomo of Spoleto where Lippi had been buried, Lorenzo il Magnifico ordered the construction of the sepulchral monument to the artist, designed by Filippino and with a celebratory inscription dictated by Agnolo Poliziano.
Among his pupils and collaborators were Fra Diamante, Filippino Lippi and Sandro Botticelli. -
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