CHAPTER X

WHEREIN WE ARE INTRODUCED TO A FRIAR WITH A ROVING EYE

IT is now necessary to call attention to the fact that there were two currents of Florentine art flowing side by side. We have seen the sombre realistic art, so typical of her genius, arising in the practice of Giotto, create the genius of Masaccio, and flow in the blood of Castagno and Franceschi. Alongside of this was the art of Fra Angelico, with hint of Siena in his blood. And now came

FRA FILIPPO LIPPI
1406 - 1469

The great Florentine art of Giotto had threatened to lapse into insipidity in the hands of the Giottesques; and Fra Angelico had arisen as the genius to complete its passing into an exquisite golden dreaminess, when Masaccio came, urged to it by the great art of the sculptor Donatello, and brought back the stern tragic intensity of Florentine art into its native vigour again. Uccello and Andrea dal Castagno completed the conquest, and disgusted the Florentines with the insipid. But the pietistic revelation of Fra Angelico did not go under. He himself, at the end of his days, had put forth a more vigorous artistic utterance ; and out of his art was to be born a style that ran beside the more vigorous work of Masaccio and his successors.

It was a strange and perplexing age that brought forth the stern and virile art of Masaccio and Andrea dal Castagno, [87] fiercely concerned with character and strength and tragic intensity, on the one hand, and, on the other, the winsome and exquisite search for beauty of Fra Filippo Lippi, the worldly Carmelite. But there they grew, side by side. FRA FILIPPO LIPPI, the son of a butcher, has left us no tally of his early training as artist. Left an orphan at a tender age, it came about that at eight he was in the care of the Carmelite monastery, hard by his old home, and thereby became steeped in the atmosphere of the best Florentine painting. The Giottesque painter and miniaturist Lorenzo Monaco, Fra Angelico, and Masaccio were famous, and the lad's eyes at least dwelt upon their achievement. Growing up to youth in the precincts of the Carmine Church, he must often have loitered to watch Masaccio painting upon his frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel. Masaccio ended his short twenty-seven years of life in 1428, when Fra Filippo Lippi was twenty-two years of age ; and three years thereafter (1431) the friar left the convent, for which he had shown but sorry vocation ; and though he kept the friendship of the friars, and signed his pictures with his monastic name, he entered upon that stormy and romantic life, filled with worldly adventure and wild living, which was to make of him so strange a son of Holy Church. The Church secured him appointments and good pay for the work of his hands ; but though his art was soon in wide demand, he launched himself upon a sea of money-troubles, was ever in want, entangled in violent quarrels with his patrons, careless and neglectful of his work, and hunted by creditors. Nor did he keep very strictly his vows of chastity-the flip of a petticoat ever caught his eye.

Filippo Lippi was turned fifty when he came to the Convent Church of San Margherita in Prato to paint a [88] Madonna for the Abbess. He had asked the Abbess to let one of the nuns, the beautiful, seventeen-year-old novice Lucrezia Buti, sit to him as the model. But the friar's blood burnt hot. He fell violently enamoured of the beautiful girl ; and love grew up between them. The passionate friar took advantage of the solemn public festival of the display of the Holy Girdle to steal away with her to his house. Lucrezia Buti became in 1457 the mother of Filippo Lippi's son, who was in after years to rise to fame as Filippino Lippi. It was several years before the Pope, Pius II., absolved the friar and his nun from their vows to the Church, at the suit of Cosimo de' Medici, and made Lucrezia the lawful wife of the painter. Fra Filippo Lippi did not long live to play the wedded husband, dying at Spoleto on the 4th of October 1469, after a sharp and sudden illness, and leaving unfinished in the Cathedral Choir of Spoleto the frescoes of the Life of the Virgin that he had there gone to paint.

The lunette of The Assumption, painted by Filippo Lippi in tempera on a panel for Cosimo de' Medici, whose crest, three feathers held by a ring, is seen upon the design-a picture now at the National Gallery in London-is an exquisite example, and typical, of the friar's beauty of colouring and tenderness, and displays his gift of expressing the winsome sweetness for which his Madonnas are famous-the whole set in a glowing colour-harmony, and treated with wondrous finesse. This design of the Archangel Gabriel announcing to the Virgin Mary that she has been chosen to be the Mother of the Christ, became a favourite subject of the painters of the Renaissance. Fra Filippo Lippi, or Lippo Lippi as he is called for short, revealed such a beautiful sense of colour, that one regrets his early training for the Church. He was at heart a romantic poet.

VI
FRA FILIPPO LIPPI
1406? - 1469
TUSCAN SCHOOL
"THE ANNUNCIATION"
(NATIONAL GALLERY)
The Archangel Gabriel is seen in the act of announcing to the Virgin that she shall be the Mother of the Christ.
A lunette-shaped picture painted for Cosimo de' Medici and marked with his crest, three feathers tied together in a ring.
Painted in tempera on wood. 2 ft. 2 in. h. x 4 ft. 11 1/2 in. w. (0.661 x 1.51).

[89] His decorations in the choir of the cathedral (Duomo) at Prato, wherein he painted the Legends of John the Baptist and Saint Stephen, reveal his grasp of portraiture, his gift of character, and harmonious skill in grouping. In the dance of Salome before Herod, all his poetic sense is displayed. Here are the movement of the dance, dramatic force, and beauty of form. Here Lippo Lippi discovered the oneness of the arts of colour and music.

Filippo Lippi's place in the development of the art of painting is difficult to set down clearly unless as a parallel growth of Fra Angelico's artistry and significance-what may be called the Francis of Assisi mood-side by side with the tragic intensity of the growth of Masaccio's art. He owed his chief inspiration to Fra Angelico and the cloister that bred the soul of Fra Angelico; but his art, whilst it displays a fuller development of the craft of painting, lacks, as his life lacked, the tenderness and rarity of spiritual feeling of the saintly Dominican. Of Masaccio's strength he shows small sign, yet he did not gaze at Masaccio working upon the Brancacci frescoes in vain. But he had a vision that both his forerunners lacked. Apart from the charm of his work, apart from the sensuous revelling in beauty of form, he came to the utterance of glowing and rich colour, and his painted surfaces knew the light of the sun ; his generous temperament revelled in the forms of flowers, and his eyes delighted in the mother's love and tender care of babes ; to him the fresh babies' faces and the delicate fragile beauty of the Madonna were an eternal inspiration. His influence on the Church painters was very great ; and he stands out as increaser of the development of Fra Angelico's spirit in Florentine painting, as Masaccio does towards the more vigorous and tragic Florentine art of Giotto.