Filippino[[47]] was born in 1457, at Prato, and presumably received his first instruction from his father, Fra Filippo. At fifteen we find him an orphan and studying with Botticelli, whom he probably assisted at Rome in 1482. At twenty-seven, in 1484, he had the extraordinary honor of completing Masaccio’s frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel. Doubtless he had his great predecessor’s sketches to aid him. With a somewhat lighter accent, he imitated as he might Masaccio’s simple and massive construction in light and shade. Filippino’s Peter before the Proconsul, Figure [140], and Crucifixion of St. Peter are of a gravity and weight to have passed for Masaccio’s with good critics. But the fine portraits are distinctive for the later date, as are the portraits and the graceful kneeling boy painted opposite in the fresco left unfinished by Masaccio.
Fig. 140. Filippino Lippi. St. Peter before Nero. Detail of Fresco.—Brancacci Chapel.
As a work of pious assimilation, Filippino’s frescoes are amazing; all his more original work is so much falling-off from his beginnings. His characteristic sensitive prettiness may be best observed in the altar-piece in the Badia representing St. Bernard’s Vision of the Virgin. Figure [141]. As he writes her praises, she approaches his desk escorted by eager angels. The scenic picturesqueness of the landscape, the accentuated prettiness of the faces are characteristic. Superficially like Botticelli, Filippino is less selective and always more sentimental. He is rudely shaken out of a mode in which he is attractive by the advent of the new giants of painting, Leonardo and Signorelli. In his last work, painted about 1502 for the Strozzi Chapel of Santa Maria Novella, he spends himself in superfluous and ineffective inventions,—trophies, archæological ornaments. To lend impressiveness and tragedy to the martyrdom of St. Philip and St. James, or to the miracle of Drusiana, Figure [142], he has recourse to hideous contortions of mouth and brows, to creaking joints and bursting muscles, to clamor and sensationalism of all sorts. It is the bankruptcy of the gentle spirit who only twenty years earlier had shown himself almost a great artist in the Carmine, and only ten years earlier had proved himself an accomplished decorator, at the Minerva, Rome. And the pity of this plunge into competitive and hopeless exhibitionism is that Filippino was a man of taste and character, a collector of classical antiques, an obliging and generous spirit. He died in 1504 at the moment when Leonardo da Vinci was planning a real and successful sensation for Florence, in The Fight for the Standard.
Fig. 141. Filippino Lippi. St. Bernard’s Vision.—Badia.
Fig. 143. Piero di Cosimo. Primitive Man. Spalliera panel.—Metropolitan Museum, N. Y.
Fig. 142. Filippino Lippi. Raising of Drusiana by St. John.—S. M. Novella, Florence.