That such conceptions as the Virgin in National Gallery "Annunciation," or the lovely Madonna in the tondo at the Palazzo Pitti, and many other authentic works by the master, are lacking in spirituality of expression, cannot be seriously maintained by anybody who approaches these pictures with an open mind and judges the artist by his achievement, not by his manner of life. Even Mr. Berenson, the most authoritative modern critic of Italian art, denies Fra Filippo a "profound sense of either material or spiritual significance—the essential qualifications of the real artist," although he admits in the same essay[1] that "his real place is with the genre painters, only his genre was that of the soul, as that of others—of Benozzo Gozzoli, for example—was of the body." Browning, with the true poet's intuition, states the case of Fra Filippo more clearly than the vast majority of professional critics from Vasari to the present day, when he makes the friar exclaim:
"... Now is this sense, I ask?
A fine way to paint soul, by painting body
So ill, the eye can't stop there, must go further
And can't fare worse!...
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[II]
Whereas all questions concerning Fra Filippo's artistic education remain largely a matter of conjecture and deduction, there is no lack of documentary material for a fairly accurate reconstruction of his life. Vasari remains, of course, the basis for any such attempt; but the archives of Florence and Prato have yielded a rich harvest of contemporary records, on the strength of which it is possible to clear up the contradictions and to correct the numerous errors that have crept into Vasari's life of The Florentine Painter, Fra Filippo Lippi.
Filippo was the son of Tommaso di Lippo, a butcher in a poor quarter of Florence, and of Mona Antonia di Bindo Sernigi. None of the various dates given in his wonted loose fashion by Vasari for the birth of the artist, accords with ascertainable facts, which point to the years 1406 to 1409, with probability favouring the earlier date. According to a document in the Archivio di Stato in Florence, confirmed by an entry in the account books of the convent of the Carmine, in which "Philippus Tomasi" is stated to have received his garments at the expense of that establishment, Filippo took the habit in the year 1421. There are no reasons to doubt Milanesi's well-reasoned suggestion that the artist was fifteen years of age when he took the vow—which would place the year of his birth about 1406.
"By the death of his father," continues Vasari, "he was left a friendless orphan at the age of two years, his mother having also died shortly after his birth. The child was for some time under the care of a certain Mona Lapaccia, his aunt, the sister of his father, who brought him up with great difficulty till he had attained his eighth year, when, being no longer able to support the burden of his maintenance, she placed him in the convent of the Carmelites." Since, however, an income-tax return, discovered by Milanesi, proves Mona Antonia, Filippo's mother, to have been still alive in 1427, and apparently in tolerably comfortable circumstances, this account of Filippo's sad childhood must be relegated to the sphere of fiction. Destined for the Church, he was presumably at the age of eight placed with the Carmelites to be prepared for his vocation. That he showed no inclination for book-learning and "manifested the utmost dullness and incapacity in letters," and that he preferred to daub his and the other boys' books with caricatures, need not be doubted, for his extant letters prove him to have been strikingly illiterate even for his days. Nor is Filippo the only artist who evinced an early inclination for the artistic profession in this manner.