Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 29, 2025
FRA FILIPPO LIPPI, born in Florence about 1406, and dying there in 1469, was the exact antithesis of Fra Angelico, both in his private life and in the method of his painting. He was just as earthly in both respects as Fra Angelico was heavenly.
Then, as now, there were two types of artists, considered as men; there were Bohemians and scholars. Lionardo and Michelangelo were grave and learned students; so was Beato Angelico in a sense limited to theology. But Benvenuto, Lippo Lippi and Buffalmacco were typical Bohemians.
The assertion and contradiction of ideas and theories, the rivalries of differing schools, the sweet devotion of Fra Angelico, the innovations of Masolino and Masaccio, the theory of perspective of Paolo Uccello, the varied works of Fabriano, Antonello da Messina, the Lippi, Botticelli, Ghirlandajo, the Bellini, and their contemporaries, culminated in the inimitable painting of the Cinquecento in works still unsurpassed, ever challenging artists of later centuries to the task of equalling or excelling them.
The 'Two Bishops'; the sixteenth century one ordering his tomb of jasper and basalt in St. Praxed's Church, and his nineteenth century successor rolling out his post-prandial Apologia. 'My Last Duchess, the 'Soliloquy in a Spanish Cloister, 'Andrea del Sarto, 'Fra Lippo Lippi, 'Rabbi Ben Ezra, 'Cleon, 'A Death in the Desert, 'The Italian in England, and 'The Englishman in Italy.
It is a little picture to steal. Nothing to steal here. Returning through Sala Prima we come to the Sala del Perugino and are among the masters once more riper and richer than most of those we have already seen, for Tuscan art here reaches its finest flower. Perugino is here and Botticelli, Fra Bartolommeo and Leonardo, Luca Signorelli, Fra Lippo Lippi and Filippino Lippi. And here is a Masaccio.
Imagine a collection of gold ornaments, jewels, and enamels, in which we can detect the skill of the goldsmith, of the painter of stained-glass, of the engraver, and of the illuminator of missals; the inspiration is grave and monastic, the destination a palace or a cathedral, the effect dazzling; and out of this miraculous handicraft Filippo Lippi is always distinct, soft as the dawn, mysterious as a flower, less vigorous but more illusive than Botticelli, and so strangely personal that while looking at him we are absorbed.
"We certainly shall not do much but look at pictures for weeks to come, uncle; that is sure!" said Malcom, "for the girls are bewitched with them, and now that they think they can learn to know, as soon as they see it, a Giotto, a Fra Angelico, a Botticelli, or a Fra Filippo Lippi, they will be simply crazy. You ought to hear the learned way in which they are beginning to discourse about them.
It was realism sometimes a kind of mystic evocation of nature, disembodied and divinely pure, as in Beato Angelico; often exquisitely fresh and youthful, as in his pupil, Benozzo Gozzoli, whose vast series of frescoes half fills the Camposanto of Pisa sometimes tentative and experimental, or gravely grand, as in Masaccio, impetuous and energetic as in Fra Lippo Lippi, fanciful as in Botticelli but still, always realism, in the sense of using nature directly, without any distinct effort at illusion, the figures mostly taken from life, and generally disposed in one plane, the details minute, the landscapes faithful rather than suggestive.
The rest of the frescoes, the St. Paul visiting St. Peter in Prison, below on the left, part of the fresco next to it, the Liberation of St. Peter opposite, and the St. Peter and St. Paul before Nero, and the Crucifixion of St. Peter, below on the right, are the work of Filippino Lippi.
And Owen stole into the room with so little noise that Evelyn did not hear him, and all the room was seen and understood before she turned: the crucifix above the bedstead, the pious prints, engravings which they had bought in Italy Botticelli and Filippo Lippi.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking