Page:Biographical catalogue of the principal Italian painters.djvu/118

UPPI. 87 cis ; a Portrait and three subjects with the Virgin attributed to this painter. LIPPI, Fra Fnjppo, b, at Florence, 1412; died at Spoleto, October 8, 1469, aged 57. Tuscan School. Fra Filippo was the son of Tommaso Lippi, who died when his son was only two years old : his mother died soon after he was bom ; and he was placed by an aunt in the Carmelite Convent Del Carmine, when only eight years old. He showed such a taste for drawing that the Prior allowed him to spend much of his time in watching Masaccio, then, about 1425, engaged in his fresco of "the Consecration of the Carmine" in the cloister of the convent, by the side of which, in his seventeenth or eighteenth year, Filippo painted a fresco of " the Confirmation of the Bules of the Carmelites." In 1430 Filippo left the convent and went to Ancona; here he was captured by a pirate, and sold as a slave in Africa. In 1435 he recovered his liberty, and recommenced his cai-eer at Naples, but shortly returned to Florence, and painted, for Cosmo de' Medici, an ^ Adoration of the Madonna," which is now in the gallery of the Uffi^. He then commenced a succession of great works for Florence, Fiesole, Arezzo, and Prato. While engaged at Prato, where are his most important works, he, in 1458, carried off from the Convent of Santa Margherita' Lucrezia Buti, a young Florentine lady who was being educated at the convent, and he had a son by her called Filippino Lippi, who also became a great painter. Lucrezia would not return to her relations, and Vasari alludes to a vague report that they poisoned Filippo, out of revenge for the disgrace which he had brought upon the family ; a fact, however, of which there is not the slightest evi- dence, and scarcely mere probability, as Filippo died eleven years after the abduction of Lucrezia Buti. Fra Filippo excelled, for his time, in an extraordinary degree, in many of the highest departments of painting; in its technical development, in invention, in drawing, in colouring, and in chiaros- curo, he must be accounted among the greatest of the Italian painters, from Masaccio to Baphael inclusive. Many of his works have perished, but many aie still preserved, of which the Coro- nation of the Virgin, in the gallery of the Academy at Florence is an admir- able example. As a man devoted to pleasure, he could not, as he did not possess it, imbue his works with that lofty piety which distinguishes Fra Giovanni da Fiesole ; his merits were more material, and his highest qualities of a simple social character. He was, however, a great painter, and in tone wa«t the pre- cursor of FraBailolomeo and Leonardo da Vinci. His figures are often grand, and his draperies are massive and majestic. Wftrks. Prato, choir of the Duomo, the Lives of St. Stephen and of John the Baptist: transept of the cathe- dral, the Death of St Bernard ( 1451-63 ). Spoleto, choir of the cathe- dral. Florence, Academy, a Coronation of the Virgin, for which Filippo was paid 1200 lire or francs in 1447, when money was worth twenty times what it is now ; it was formerly in the church of Sant' Ambrogio, and is the finest pic- ture by Filippo in Florence ; two others are in this collection, representing the Virgin and Child, with Saints: Pitti Palace, Madonna and Child, with St. Anne, &c. : Ufiizj, St. Augustine writ- ing. Berlin Gallery, the Virgin adoring the Infant Christ, with the Father, St. John, and St. Bernard, marked FRATER PHILIPPUS F. Munich, the Annunciation. Louvre, the Na- tivity; and the Virgin and Child adored by two Saints. The frescoes of Fi- hppo in the Carmine, were all destroyed