Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 14.djvu/709

L I P L I P 685 II. FILIPPINO or LIPPINO LIPPI (14GO-1505) was the natural son of Fra Lippo Lippi and Lucrezia Buti, born in Florence and educated at Prato. Losing Ins father before he had completed his tenth year, the boy took up his avocation as a painter, studying under Sandro Botticelli, and probably under Fra Diamante. The style which he formed was to a great extent original, but it bears clear traces of the manner both of Lippo and of Botticelli, more ornamental than the first, more realistic and less poetical than the second. His powers developed early ; for we find him an accomplished artist by 1480, when he painted an altarpiece, the Vision of St Bernard, now in the Badia of Florence ; it is in tempera, with almost the same force as oil painting. Soon afterwards, probably from 1482 to 1490, he began to work upon the frescos which completed the decoration of the famous Brancacci chapel in the Carmine, commenced by Masolino and Masaccio many years before. He finished Masaccio s subject of the Resurrection of the King s Son, and was the sole author of Paul s Interview with Peter in Prison, the Liberation of Peter, the Two Saints before the Proconsul, and the Cruci fixion of Peter. These works, were none others extant from his hand, are sufficient to prove that Lippino stood in the front rank of the artists of his time. The dignified and expressive figure of St Paul in the second-named subject has always been particularly admired, and appears to have furnished a suggestion to Raphael for his Paul at Athens. Portraits of Luigi Pulci, Antonio Pollaiuolo, Lippino himself, and various others are to be found in this series. In 1485 he executed the great altarpiece of the Virgin and Saints, with several other figures, now in the Uffizi Gallery. Another of his leading works is the altar- piece for the Nerli Chapel in S. Spirito the Virgin En throned, with splendidly living portraits of Xerli and his wife, and a thronged distance. In 1489 Lippino was in Rome, painting in the church of the Minerva, having first passed through Spoleto to design the monument for his father in the cathedral of that city. Some of his principal frescos in the Minerva are still extant, the subjects being in celebration of St Thomas Aquinas. In one picture the saint is miraculously commended by a crucifix; in another, triumphing over heretics. In 1496 Lippino painted the Adoration of the Magi now in the Uffizi, a very striking picture, with numerous figures. This was succeeded by his last important undertaking, the frescos in the Strozzi Chapel, in the church of S. Maria Novella in Florence Drusiana Restored to Life by St John the Evangelist, St John in the Cauldron of Boiling Oil, and two subjects from the legend of St Philip. These are conspicuous and attractive works, yet somewhat grotesqueand exaggerated, full of ornate architecture, showy colour, and the distinctive peculiarities of the master. Filippino, who had married in 1497, died in 1505 of an attack of throat disease and fever, aged only forty-five. His character for amiability and courtesy is described in very laudatory terms by Vasari. The best-reputed of his scholars was Raffaellino del Garbo. Like his father, Filippino had a most marked original genius for painting, and lie was hardly less a chief among the artists of his time than Fra Filippo had been in his ; it may be said that in all the annals of the art a rival instance is not to be found of a father and son each of whom had such pre-eminent natural gifts and leadership. The father displayed more of sentiment, and candid sweetness of motive ; the son more of richness, variety, and lively pictorial combination. He was admirable in all matters of decora tive adjunct and presentment, such as draperies, landscape back grounds, and accessories ; and he was the first Florentine to intro duce a taste for antique details of costume, &c. He formed a large collection of objects of this kind, and left his designs of them to his son. In his later works there is a tendency to a mannered development of the extremities, and generally to facile overdoing. The London National Gallery possesses a good and characteristic though not exactly a first-rate specimen of Lippino, the Virgin and Child between Sts Jerome and Dominic. III. LORENZO LIPPI (1 606-1 G64), a painter and poet, was born in Florence. He studied painting under Matteo Rosselli, the influence of whose style, and more especially of that of Santi di Tito, is to be traced in Lippi s works, which are marked by taste, delicacy, and a strong turn for portrait-like naturalism. His maxim was " to poetize as he spoke, and to paint as he saw." After exercising his art for some time in Florence, and having married at the age of forty the daughter of a rich sculptor named Susini, Lippi went as court painter to Innsbruck, where he has left many excellent portraits. There he wrote his humorous poem named Malmantile Racquistato, which was published under the anagrammatic pseudonym of " Pcrlone Zipoli." Lippi was a friend of Salvator Rosa, and was a man of pleasant and generous temper, and very polite. He was, however, somewhat self-sufficient, and, when visiting Parma, would not look at the famous Correggios there, saying that they could teach him nothing. He died of pleurisy in 1664. The most esteemed works of Lippi as a painter are a Crucifixion in the gallery at Florence, and a Triumph of David which he executed for the saloon of Angiolo Galli, introducing into it portraits of the seventeen children of the owner. His poem the Malmantile Racquistato is a burlesque romance, mostly compounded out of a variety of popular tales ; its principal subject-matter is an expedition for the recovery of a fortress and territory whose queen had been expelled by a female usurper. It is full of graceful or racy Florentine idioms, and is counted by Italians as a " testo di lingua." Lippi is more generally or more advantageously remem bered by this poem than by anything which he has left in the art of painting. It was not published until 1688, several years after his death. (W. M. R.) LIPSIUS, JUSTUS (1547-1606), the Latinized form of Joest Lips, an eminent humanist of the 16th century, born 18th October 1547, at Overyssche, a small village in Brabant, about half way between Brussels and Ottignies. Sent early to the Jesuit college in Cologne, he was removed at seventeen to the university of Louvain by his parents, who had some reason for fearing that he might be induced to become a professed member of the Society of Jesus. But he had received at Cologne two mental tendencies from which he never emancipated himself. One of these, which was suppressed or suspended in middle life, asserted itself later in his return to the bosom of the Catholic Church before his death. The other, derived from his Jesuit train ing, showed itself in his merely rhetorical or verbal view of classical literature, of which the one interest lay in its style. Lipsius rushed into print at twenty with one of those volumes of miscellaneous remarks then in vogue ( Variarum Lectionum Libri Tres, 1567), the dedication of which to Cardinal Granvella procured him an appointment as Latin secretary, and a visit to Rome in the retinue of the cardinal. Here Lipsius remained two years, using his spare time in study of the Latin classics, in viewing the monuments, collecting inscriptions, and handling MSS. in the Vatican. A comparison of a second volume of miscellaneous criticism (Antiquarian Lectionum Libri Quinque, 1575), published after his return from Rome, with the Varix Lectiones of eight years earlier shows that he had advanced from the notion of purely conjectural emendation to that of emending by collation, and that he had learnt to distinguish between a "good" and a "bad" MS. In Rome he also made the acquaintance of Muretus, Paullus Manutius, and the other humanists of the catholic reaction who were then in credit there. He was also noticed by Cardinal Sirleto and Fulvio Orsini ; but he can hardly have even seen in the street Sigonio and Vettorio, and the introduction of these cele brated names is perhaps only a stylistic flourish of the biographer Le Mire, to whom we owe the only original account of Lipsius s life. In 1570 he wandered over Burgundy, Germany, Austria, Bohemia, in search of learn-