Fra Lippo Lippi

“ The hands are among the most beautiful in existence, and the landscape, with its one tree and its fairy architecture, is a continual delight. Among "Annunciations," as among pictures, it stands very high. It has more of sophistication than most: the Virgin not only recognizes the honour, but the doom, which the painter himself foreshadows in the predella, where Christ is seen rising from the grave. None of Fra Angelico's simple radiance here, and none of Fra Lippo Lippi's glorified matter-of-fact. Here is tragedy. The painting of the Virgin's head-dress is again marvellous. ”

“ Fra Lippo Lippi comments freely and quaintly on the absurdity of showing soul by means of bodies so ill-painted that no one can bear to dwell upon them, as on the fallacy involved in all contempt for the earthly life. "He will never believe that the world, with all its life and beauty, is an unmeaning blank. ”

“ Love is best!
Another characteristic of Browning was his consummate comprehension of artistic ideals, those of temperaments so opposite as Fra Lippo Lippi, Pictor Ignotus, and that too-perfect painter Andrea del Sarto. ”

“ Each is in itself a drama, and contains the essence of a life, condensed into a single episode, or indicated in a combination of discourse, conversation, argument, soliloquy, reminiscence. Each, besides being the presentation of a character, moves in a certain atmosphere of its own, philosophical, ethical, or artistic. Andrea del Sarto and Fra Lippo Lippi deal with art. ”

“ Foremost, however, among the treasures of the Duomo, are Fra Lippo Lippi's frescoes in the choir, considered his most important work. Nothing, perhaps, puts one so fully in touch with fifteenth-century men and art as the career of this vigorous and prolific artist, a true son of the Renaissance, who, while he paints sweet-faced Madonnas, dimpled children, and holy saints on monastery walls, [65] follows his own pleasures and trolls out his careless love song ”

“ Fra Lippo Lippi gives no consecutive history of his life, only such snatches of it as partially account for his present mad freak, but the strife between his own nature and instinct on the one hand and the conventions and traditions of religious art on the other could hardly be more vividly presented. In a Balcony, the one drama in Men and Women, has but a fragment of a plot, but in intensity, reality, and passion it excels most of Browning's dramas, and, in spite of its long speeches, has proved effective on the stage. ”

“ In his great works the proportions are larger than life.
Along with Vasari’s interesting and amusing, and possibly not very unauthentic, account of Lippo Lippi, the work of Crowe and Cavalcaselle should be consulted. Also: E. C. Strutt, Fra Lippo Lippi (1901) ; C. M. Phillimore, Early Florentine Painters (1881) ; B. Supino, Fra Filippo Lippi (illustrated) (1902) . It should be observed that Crowe and Cavalcaselle give 1412 as the date of the painter’s birth, and this would make a considerable difference in estimating details of his after career. ”

“ Sandro Botticelli, born at Florence in 1457, died 1515; a celebrated Florentine painter; “the wronged Lippino,” or Filippo Lippi, known as Filippino or Lippino (1460-1505) , a Florentine painter, son of Fra Lippo Lippi. Some of his pictures were attributed to other artists, hence the expression “wronged”; Frà Angelico (1387-1455) —Il Beato Fra Giovanni Angelico da Fiesole—was the great Dominican Friar-Painter of Florence, the greatest of all painters of sacred subjects. ”

“ Browning followed good authority in making Masaccio a pupil of Fra Lippo Lippi, but in point of fact he was probably the master whose works Fra Lippo studied. Lübke (History of Art ii, 207) says of Guidi: "In his exceedingly short life he rapidly traversed the various stages of development of earlier art, and pressed on with a bold confidence to a greatness and power of vision which have rendered his works the characteristic ones of an epoch, and his example a decisive influence in all the art of the fifteenth century.... ”

“ This soft Umbrian world of dreamy landscape, which we find in Perugino's pictures, is like a clearer vision of the land we already descry far off with Fra Angelico, where his angels sing and his saints dance for gladness.
It is a different and a more real life that you see in the work of Fra Lippo Lippi. Realism, it is the very thought of all Florentine work of the fifteenth century. Seven pictures by the Frate have been gathered in this gallery,—the Madonna and Child Enthroned, the St. ”

“ But Prato's great artistic glory must be sought in Fra Lippo Lippi's frescoes in the choir, painted between 1452 and 1464. These are the great achievements of the Friar's life. On the left is the life of St. Stephen, on the right that of the Baptist. They show very strongly the influence of [417] Masaccio, and make us understand why the Florentines said that the spirit of Masaccio had entered into the body of Fra Filippo. ”

“ Almost every master in the fifteenth century ... studied these great works and learned from them. One of the first of these masters was Fra Lippo Lippi." The important point is that Fra Lippo and Masaccio were both pioneers in the new art which took infinite pains in the representation of the body. Masaccio is said to have been the first Italian artist to paint a nude figure.
323. A Saint Laurence ... at Prato. Prato a town near Florence, attracted many artists in the fifteenth century, so that one finds there many specimens of Early Renaissance painting. ”

“ What is left to us of that far-away flower-like beauty of fifteenth-century painting and sculpture will be found in the great transept, that makes of the church a cross of light, a temple of the sun. Here, amid many works of that time given to Fra Lippo Lippi, Botticelli, Ghirlandajo, Donatello, and others, in the south transept there is a Madonna with the family of de' Nerli by Filippino Lippi, and in the Capponi Chapel a fine portrait of Neri Capponi, while in the next chapel Perugino's Vision of St. ”

“ The poet, misconceived by his generation, poor, and lonely, has yet a great spiritual personality. Men see the old coat. God, the King for whom he works, sees his real nature; hence heavenly guards attend when this man comes to die.
115. The Prado. The chief fashionable promenade of Madrid.
FRA LIPPO LIPPI
Fra Lippo Lippi was born in Florence in 1406. See Vasari's Lives of the Painters for the account of his life on which Browning based his poem. (Vasari's account is quoted in Cooke's Browning Guide Book.) ”

“ It is in regard to the matter expressed, rather than to the mode of expression, that we have a right to look for a difference between such men as Lippo Lippi and Fra Angelico. According to a man's inner tone and temperament and character, will be the impression produced upon him by the objects of his contemplation. These will determine him largely in the choice of his themes, and in the aspect under which he will treat them. Obviously in many cases there are noble themes of art for whose appreciation no particular delicacy of moral or religious taste is required. ”

“ There is a fine Domenico Ghirlandajo—the Adoration of the Shepherds; a fine Lippo Lippi; and an Assumption, by Perugino, which I like well for its cherubs and angels, and for some of the adoring figures below. In the smaller room there is a lovely Pietà by Fra Angelico; and there is a portrait of Fra Angelico himself by another artist.
One of our drives at Florence, which I have not mentioned, was that to Galileo's Tower, which stands conspicuous on one of the hills close about the town. ”

“ Few pictures are so thoroughly enjoyable as those of Lippo Lippi; they show the naiveté of a strong, rich nature, redundant in lively and somewhat whimsical observation. He approaches religious art from its human side, and is not pietistic though true to a phase of Catholic devotion. ”

“ But the gem of the whole room is Lippo Lippi's Coronation of the Madonna (62) , one of the masterpieces of the early Florentine school, which he commenced for the nuns of Sant' Ambrogio in 1441. The throngs of boys and girls, bearing lilies and playing at being Angels, are altogether delightful, and the two little orphans, that are being petted by the pretty Florentine lady on our right, are characteristic of Fra Filippo's never failing sympathy with child life. On the left two admirably characterised monks are patronised by St. ”

“ In his admirable school there is no painter one enjoys--pace Ruskin--more sociably and irresponsibly. Lippo Lippi is simpler, quainter, more frankly expressive; but we retain before him a remnant of the sympathetic discomfort provoked by the masters whose conceptions were still a trifle too large for their means. The pictorial vision in their minds seems to stretch and strain their undeveloped skill almost to a sense of pain. In Ghirlandaio the skill and the imagination are equal, and he gives us a delightful impression of enjoying his own resources. ”

“ Lippi, Fra Filippo, Italian painter, born at Florence; left an orphan, was brought up in a monastery, where his talent for art was developed and encouraged; went to Ancona, was carried off by pirates, but procured his release by his skill in drawing, and returning to Italy practised his art in Florence and elsewhere, till one day he eloped with a novice in a nunnery who sat to him for a Madonna, by whom he became the father of a son no less famous than himself; he prosecuted his art amid poverty with zeal and success to the last ”

“ Having learned prosperously how to manage gold, [Pg 496] he took a fancy to know how to manage colour, and was put under the best master in Florence, the Monk Lippi" (see 666) . Some characteristics of Lippi's art—its union of a buoyant spirit of life and enjoyment with simplicity and tenderness of religious feeling—are seen in the pupil. But he added in his turn marked characteristics of his own, which are noticed in detail under his several pictures here. "Where Fra Filippo was all repose, Sandro was all movement." ”

“ And now we come to the most amazing [53] chapter of this fifteenth-century romance. Fra Filippo Lippi, the monk who had broken his vow and was openly living at Prato with the equally guilty nun, actually continued to administer to the spiritual welfare of the nuns of the convent that had been so irretrievably disgraced by his conduct! That his misdeed was allowed to pass unpunished and uncensured, may have encouraged others to follow his and Lucrezia's example. ”

“ The foreshortening of some of the dead figures shows great art and proves that Lippo was conscious of some of the difficulties of his profession and endeavoured to some extent to overcome them. It was Lippo also who painted the wings of the tabernacle of the church of S. Giovanni, where are Andrea's angels and his St John, in relief, doing some stories of St John the Baptist in tempera, with great diligence. ”

“ He was the same consistent, humble man who had hesitated to eat meat at the Pope's own table without the permission of the prior of his convent—a man who, like the great Saint Bernard, had given up a prosperous worldly existence in pure love of religious peace. It was no wonder that such a man should become the realist of the angels and a sort of angel among realists—himself surnamed by his companions the 'Blessed' and the 'Angelic.'
Beside him, younger than he, but contemporary with him, stands out his opposite, Filippo Lippi. He was not born rich, like Angelico. ”

“ The judgment of the Curia was confirmed, the Pope referring on this occasion to Fra Filippo as a painter qui plurima et nefanda scelera perpetravit. Nevertheless, some years later, our artist is still mentioned as rettore e commendatario di San Quirico a Legnaja. From which it may be assumed that the judgment deprived him merely of his spiritual office, and left him in enjoyment of the revenue connected with the post.
The ups and downs of Filippo Lippi's [37] career in the fifties of the fourteen-hundreds are more than a little confusing. ”

“ The painter cannot look upon the crowd of men about him without seeing faces he would like to draw. One man would do as a model for Judas. Another would do well in a picture Fra Lippo's imagination quickly conjures up of a slave holding the head of John the Baptist by the hair. In Fra Lippo's real picture of the beheading of John the Baptist the head is brought in by Salome, the daughter of Herodias, on a great platter. ”

“ There was a silence in the room, and each man watched the other narrowly. Moratti looked at the cavaliere's long hatchet face, at the cruel close-set eyes, at the thin red hair showing under his velvet cap, and at the straight line of the mouth, partly hidden by a moustache, and short peaked beard of a slightly darker red than the hair on di Lippo's head. Michele di Lippo, in his turn, keenly scanned the seamed and haughty features of the bravo, and each man recognised in the other the qualities he respected, if such a word may be used. ”

“ The Florentine painter Lippo was a man of most rare and varied invention; however unfortunate his works, and however unhappy his life, which did not long endure. He was born in Florence about the year of our salvation 1354, and although it was somewhat late before he commenced the study of painting, since he had already attained the period of manhood, he was yet so well aided by nature, which disposed him to the study of art, and by his genius, which was most admirable, that he made wonderful progress in a very short time. ”

“ In the progress of his style from the early "Nativities" to the Prato frescoes is reflected the whole course of Early Renaissance art from Gothic awkwardness to full freedom. Of course, Fra [67] Filippo lived in a period of transition and of passionate striving for expression; and to a certain extent every artist is the product of the spirit of his time. The tendencies which resulted in the full blossoming of Renaissance art were at work, and would, no doubt, have conquered in the end, even if Filippo Lippi had never existed. ”