“I shall paint
God in the midst, Madonna and her Babe.
Ringed by a bowery, flowery angel-brood,
Lilies and vestments and white faces, sweet
As puff on puff of grated orris-root
When ladies crowd to church at Midsummer.”
Our picture is evidence enough that the time has come to Florentine art when youth shall be served.
Monastic vows, and in fact duties of any sort, bore lightly on Fra Filippo. He tasted the forbidden sweets of life recklessly, and worked only when the rare mood urged. He was in and out of the good graces of the Medici. Called to Prato to fresco the choir of the Collegiata, in 1455, he was nine years achieving what a steady workman would have done in two. But in the meantime Fra Filippo had run away with the nun, Lucrezia Buti, shuffled off his monastic vows (through the indulgence of the humanist Pope, Pius II), married and settled down as the father of a family. His random joyous course was nearly run, and his last frescoes at Prato show a kind of discipline that is foreign to his earlier work. In 1464 he completed the Feast of Herod and the Funeral of St. Stephen, frescoes which forecast the sort of narrative painting that was to mark the close of the century.
About the brutality of the Feast of Herod, Figure [105], Fra Filippo has cast a dreamy glamour, as indeed Giotto had before him. The youthful guests are absorbed in Salome’s dancing. Following the sculptors of the day, Fra Filippo has made her slight and graceful, as she trips a careless measure. The air is simply that of a gentle society. The grim motive of the delivery of the head of John the Baptist to Herodias is gently emphasized by the charming act of two little handmaids who clutch each other for fright. The sprightliness of the invention, the generalized idyllic charm of the feeling, the rich variety of accessories, the youthful timbre of the whole—make this not merely one of the best but also one of the most characteristic narrative mural paintings of the Early Renaissance. It strikes the note which will be echoed by Fra Filippo’s apprentice, Sandro Botticelli; which will be exaggerated by Fra Filippo’s son, Filippino, and distantly imitated by many another Florentine successor.
