Every phase of the triumphant progress of Renaissance art finds an echo in Filippo Lippi's painting. Masaccio helped him to shake off Gothic awkwardness and to achieve a certain degree of statuesque dignity. From Gentile da Fabriano he took the delight in gay, festive attire and sumptuous pageantry, which is clearly expressed in Sir Frederick Cook's tondo, and in a modified form in the Academy "Coronation." Pier dei Franceschi's great conquest of the realm of light and air did no more fail to leave its mark upon the Carmelite's art, than did Paolo Uccello's discoveries in the science of perspective. The classic thrones of his Madonnas and the architectural backgrounds of some of his pictures proclaim his enthusiasm for the forms and decorative details of the Renaissance churches and palaces that were then rising, under the influence of the new learning, in every part of Florence. Nor is it possible to over-estimate the prodigious effect produced upon the artist-monk's receptive mind by his study of the works of Donatello. The Uffizi "Madonna" is in reality a relief by Donatello or one of his followers translated into paint. Take any photographic reproduction of that picture, and examine the head of the roguishly smiling angel, the arms of the Infant Saviour and of the Madonna, and the way the whole group is set against the window-frame. The illusion is extraordinary. If it were not for the landscape seen through the opening in the background and the transparent folds of the veil over the Virgin's head, it would be pardonable to mistake the picture thus reduced to black and white for a bas-relief of the Donatello School.
Thus, with the shrewd intelligence of which his features in the auto-portrait introduced into the "Coronation" are so eloquent, Fra Filippo knew how to take hints and suggestions from the art of all his great contemporaries. But he applied the same keen intelligence to the study of the living world around him. The knowledge imparted to him by other masters was thus allowed to filter through his personal observation of Nature. And whilst it is possible to trace in his work the most varied artistic influences, his own personality was never eclipsed or obscured. Always ready to learn and to assimilate new principles, he never stooped to the imitation of mere mannerisms. From any such inclination he was saved by his temperament, his human sympathy, his artistic curiosity. Only to his earliest Madonnas cling reminiscences of Giottesque types and formulas. Even before he had reached full maturity, the typical had become ousted by the individual. And in this respect he was again an initiator in Florentine art. He was one of the first painters of his school who makes us feel that almost every character in his pictures is the result of personal observation—is practically a portrait. He is the first true genre painter of his school. Benozzo Gozzoli, it is true, went far beyond him as a pictorial raconteur of Florentine fifteenth-century life; but the origin of Benozzo's genre-like treatment of scriptural incidents, which makes his frescoes at Pisa and San Gimignano such precious documents, is to be found in Fra Filippo Lippi.
The Prato frescoes introduce several delicious incidents of this nature, like the leave-taking of St. John from his parents, or the child-birth scene in the episode in the life of St. Stephen. But they are not absent either from his altarpieces. The exquisitely recorded happenings in the house of St. Anne, which form the background of the Pitti "Madonna and Child," are pure genre-painting, and are, moreover, a daring departure from all the earlier conventions which ruled the rendering of this favourite subject. The earlier "Coronation of the Virgin" shows something of the same tendency in the charming group of a female saint and two children in front of the kneeling monk. The saint, like the Virgin Mary herself, is just an elegantly attired Florentine lady of the period. The very angels surrounding the throne of the Heavenly Father are humanised, as it were, by being divested of their wings. Even in the stately and formal "Virgin Enthroned," at the Louvre, Fra Filippo could not resist the temptation to introduce a roguish urchin on each side peeping over the balustrade, and thus transferring the scene from the heavenly region to this earth.
Fra Filippo loved the world in which he found so much beauty. For all that, his art reveals neither sensuality nor worldliness. He was indeed, as Mr. Berenson so happily describes him, a genre-painter, whose genre was that of the soul, as that of others was of the body. But he expressed the soul through the body. As M. André Maurel has it: "Before painting faces, he looked at them, which was a new thing.... He was a great painter, because he was a man."
The plates are printed by Bemrose & Sons, Ltd., Derby and London
The text at the Ballantyne Press, Edinburgh
[1] The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance, by Bernhard Berenson (G. P. Putnam's Sons).
[2] He retained this post until July 1452.
Transcriber's Note
Table of Contents added by Transcriber.