Fig. 105. Fra Filippo Lippi. Feast of Herod. Salome’s Dance. Fresco.—Collegiata. Prato.
If the Feast of Herod best exemplifies the element of homely poetry and inventive grace in Fra Filippo, the Burial of St. Stephen, Figure [106], just opposite in the choir proves that he was not oblivious to the high and decorous prose of his master Masaccio. In formality and power of construction few painters then living could have equalled it, and those few could not have rivalled its spacious architectural setting and its suggestion of atmosphere. At first sight it seems nearly equal to the Tribute Money or at least to the Tabitha. On more careful survey it is less noble, more insistently pathetic, and in every way more loosely knit. In particular the portraits at the sides have little but a mechanical relation to the theme. Masaccio himself had admitted a similar gallery of mere bystanders in The Miracle of the Prince, but had he lived to complete the fresco, he would doubtless have brought the portrait figures into some relation of interest in the miracle. Fra Filippo virtually waives that problem and merely flanks his real subject with bordering groups of persons of contemporary importance. As a matter of fact, the Florentine donor was no longer humble-minded and content to appear among the saints in miniature and unobtrusive guise. He now insisted in being painted to the life with his family, friends, and dependents,—a complacent, incongruous apparition amid the humility or heroism of the saints. Fra Filippo made the sensible adjustment that the donors should serve as a sort of human frame for the religious picture in the centre. This solution became tiresomely standard and lasted for fifty years or so, until the High Renaissance had authority enough to impose considerations of taste and self-effacement even upon wealthy donors.
In 1465 Fra Filippo was called to Spoleto, and there having started a lovely apse decoration, A Coronation, for the cathedral, he died and was buried. Quite unconsciously he had temporarily shattered that intellectual formalism which is the very essence of Florentine art, and had inaugurated that moral and artistic holiday which is made visible in the painting of Botticelli and Ghirlandaio and audible in the songs of Lorenzo de’ Medici.
This holiday mood is strong in Benozzo Gozzoli, and he spread it through Umbria and the Sienese country. Born in 1420, for a time an assistant of Fra Angelico, Benozzo’s task was to depict with more vivacity than insight the splendors and humors of life. This he does, whether his theme be the legend of St. Francis, as at Montefalco in 1462, the Cavalcade of the Magi, Florence, 1469, the Life of St. Augustine, San Gimignano, 1465, or the doings of the Old Testament Patriarchs and Matriarchs, at Pisa, 1468–1484. He is always sunny, profuse, witty in an obvious way; and not without his tinge of the poetry of youth. He loves gardens, courtyards, forests, and equally well palaces, colonnades, crowds and incidents. He is indefatigably panoramic, and his frescoes, if hardly good pictures, are at least good pickings, for their abundant and often refreshing detail.
Fig. 106. Fra Filippo Lippi. Funeral of St. Stephen. Fresco.—Collegiata. Prato.
Very splendid is that pageant of the Wise Men from the East, Figure [107], which he painted about 1469[[40]] for the private chapel of Cosimo de’ Medici’s palace. The gorgeous procession winds about the walls, moving over the mountain roads and through the forests which you may still see up the Arno valley towards Vallombrosa. Their goal was the little panel over the altar where Filippo Lippi painted the Madonna reverently kneeling before her Son, Figure [102]. This little picture was flanked by choirs, in fresco, of singing angels. For the oldest of the Three Kings Benozzo chose, according to tradition, the unfortunate Emperor John Palaeologus, who thirty years earlier had come to Florence on the vain mission of uniting the Eastern and Western branches of the Christian Church. The youthful kings are said to portray Giuliano and Lorenzo de’ Medici. What we really have is a pictorial version of those religious pageants or representations which were common at the times. Many times Florence had seen her patricians in such a cavalcade. Benozzo’s fresco in its undiminished loveliness of color and gold—the Medici apparently either ordered few masses or burned few candles in their family chapel—is a most precious relic of bygone splendors. Indeed they passed before Benozzo himself, for he lived on till 1498, four years after Lorenzo the Magnificent’s death, and the year of Savonarola’s martyrdom; the year, too, when Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper was being finished. Few artists have had such emphatic intimations that their world and they themselves were obsolete. It is in every way to be hoped in Benozzo’s case that he was at once too cheerful and too unintelligent to grasp the situation. This may be fairly supposed of a man who was content for fifty years of a swiftly moving world with what could be learned from Fra Angelico.
Fig. 107. Benozzo Gozzoli. Detail from Procession of Magi.—Riccardi Palace.
