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Updated: June 29, 2025
There was the good-tempered monk of the Carmine, Fra Filipo Lippi, the young Botticelli, and a youth just his own age whom they called Leonardo da Vinci, of whom it was whispered already that he would some day be the greatest master of the age. These were golden days for Perugino, as he was called, for the name of the city where he had come from was always now given to him.
They had learned that there was an artist called Masolino, who, perhaps, had begun these frescoes, and had been Masaccio's teacher; and that a young man called Filippino Lippi had finished them some years after they had been left incomplete by Masaccio's early death.
It was another friar who was, as it were, to people that world, a little more human perhaps, a little less than Paradise, which Angelico had seen; to people it at least with children, little laughing rascals from the street corner, caught with a soldo and turned into angels. Another friar, but how different. The story, so romantic, so full of laughter and tears, that Vasari has told us of Fra Lippo Lippi, is one of his best known pages; I shall not tell it again. Four little panels painted by him are here in this room, beside the work of Fra Angelico. While not far away you come upon two splendid studies by Perugino of two monks of the Vallombrosa, Dom Biagio Milanesi and Dom Baldassare, the finest portraits he ever painted, and in some sort his most living work. Four other works by Perugino may also be found here, the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, a Piet
In the church of S. Maria Sopra Minerva at Rome, where Galileo was afterwards compelled to sign his famous retractation, Filippino Lippi painted another triumph of S. Thomas, conceived in the spirit of Taddeo Gaddi's, but expressed with the freedom of the middle Renaissance. Nor should we neglect to notice the remarkable picture by Traini in S. Caterina at Pisa.
This is Browning's interest in art, the interest in a living thing, the interest in a growing thing, the insatiable interest in how things are done. Every one who knows his admirable poems on painting "Fra Lippo Lippi" and "Andrea del Sarto" and "Pictor Ignotus" will remember how fully they deal with technicalities, how they are concerned with canvas, with oil, with a mess of colours.
And what sayest thou to our Fra Lippo Lippi? A Christian monk he, forsooth! What sayest thou to Giorgione of Venice and his pupils, to this efflorescence of loveliness, to our statuaries and our builders, to our goldsmiths and musicians? Ah, we have rediscovered the secret of Greece.
Browning. In what respects is Browning like Shakespeare? What is meant by the optimism of his poetry? Can you explain why many thoughtful persons prefer him to Tennyson? What is Browning's creed as expressed in "Rabbi Ben Ezra"? Read "Fra Lippo Lippi" or "Andrea del Sarto," and tell what is meant by a dramatic monologue. In "Andrea" what is meant by the lines,
She saturated herself in Italian literature and history; and the days of Fra Angelico, Fra Lippo Lippi and Fra Girolamo Savonarola are bodied forth from lines deeply etched upon her heart. When you go to Florence carry "Romola" in your side-pocket, just as you take the "Marble Faun" to Rome. "Romola" will certainly make history live again and pass before your gaze.
Its pendant is another "Madonna and Child," No. 76, more like Lippo Lippi and very beautiful in its darker graver way. The other wall has the "Fortitude," the "Calumny," and the two little "Judith and Holofernes" pictures.
Here, it might seem, we have the end of merely decorative painting, the beginning of realism, of the effect of reality, and it is therefore with surprise we see so facile a master as Filippino Lippi set to finish work of such elemental and tremendous genius. How pretty his work seems beside these realities.
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