A Popular Handbook to the National Gallery, Volume I, Foreign Schools / Including by Special Permission Notes Collected from the Works of John Ruskin

by Unknown

589. THE VIRGIN AND CHILD.

Fra Filippo Lippi (Florentine: about 1406-1469). See 666.

Combined with Lippi's realism of representation, "there is also an unusually mystic spiritualism of conception. Nearly all the Madonnas, even of the most strictly devotional schools, themselves support the child, either on their knees or in their arms. But here the Christ is miraculously borne by an angel" (Fors Clavigera, 1875, p. 308).