A history of Italian painting

by Frank Jewett Mather

Fig. 102. Filippo Lippi. Madonna in Adoration.—Berlin.

He was the first Italian painter to care greatly for the look of everyday people. Born about the year 1400, he was early orphaned and thrust willy-nilly into the Carmelite Order. As a young man he must have seen Masaccio painting those titanic designs in the Brancacci Chapel. From Masaccio Fra Filippo learned his trade, rather by observation than by direct instruction. But he cared for far different things. He really follows the tender narrative vein of Lorenzo Monaco. To the grandeur of miracle-working apostles, he preferred the gentle quaintness of the old man who kept the shops and practiced the trades of Florence; to the matronly dignity of Masaccio’s women, he preferred the shy and alluring sweetness of the Florentine girls about him; to the majestic sweeps of mountain and valley in Masaccio, the intimate appeal of the cypress groves, the little ledges and trickling springs. In technique, too, he avoided the bold short-cuts of his master. He hung on to the line, loved details, described everything with solicitude. It is an art of amiability and curiosity, generally disregardful of that grand style towards which in her greater moments Florence ever aspired. The advent of Fra Filippo in the Florence of Giotto and Orcagna and Masaccio, was like that of an irresistibly attractive youth in a solemn company. He loosened everything up. Unconsciously he demoralized the assembly; for two generations the art of Florence was to be boyish and girlish. That is its charm and its limitation, and the difference between the Early Renaissance and the Golden Age will be largely that the latter will prefer to depict with the gravity of maturity a world that has grown up.

Fig. 103. Fra Fillipo Lippi. Madonna and Child.—Uffizi.

One of the earliest and most exquisite panels by Fra Filippo was painted shortly after 1435 for the private chapel of Cosimo de’ Medici’s new palace, and is now at Berlin. The theme, young Mary kneeling before her Divine Infant, Figure [102], is a favorite with the Florentine artists of this century. Perhaps no one has conceived it more delightfully than Fra Filippo. The picture gets its peculiar sweetness from the gentle, girlish figure of the Maiden Mother, its quality of romance from the ledgy background watered by springs and spangled with modest flowers, its tang of reality from the chubby and stolid Christchild and the boyish St. John the Baptist. You could almost see such a thing today along the shaded upper Mensola when a young Florentine mother has taken the children for a Sunday picnic. For the old Gothic conventions and the bare majesty of Masaccio’s painting, Fra Filippo has substituted the everyday joys of a feeling eye, and the charm of closely-observed little things.

Fig. 104. Fra Filippo Lippi. Coronation of the Virgin.—Uffizi.

In most of his pictures this familiar quality is marked. His saints are not types, but people of the Florentine middle class. An early Madonna in the Uffizi, Figure [103], shows the Virgin as a slight girl with her ash-blond locks elaborately dressed and braided for a holiday. She is almost overborne by her sturdy Son, an exacting brute, one may imagine, while the attendant angel is a grinning street Arab caught in the intervals of mischief. Such pictures with their winsomeness and actuality worked powerfully to break down both the old Gothic decorum and the new sublimity of Masaccio.

To grasp the novelty of Fra Filippo’s most famous panel picture, The Coronation of the Virgin, painted for the nuns of St. Ambrogio in 1441, Figure [104], and now in the Uffizi, one has only to recall the devoutly formal and simple version of the subject which Fra Angelico painted about the same time for the convent of San Marco. The composition of Fra Filippo, on the contrary, is radiantly informal. We breathe the air of the commencement at a very nice girls’ school, with adoring friends and proud relatives moving at the edges of the ceremony. Indeed God the Father has merely the air of a benevolent trustee or visiting minor celebrity awarding a prize to the best girl. It is all like the crowning of a Rosière in a French village. Robert Browning in one of the most admirable poems in “Men and Women” makes Fra Filippo promise