XIV
FILIPPINO LIPPI
1457 1504
TUSCAN SCHOOL
"THE VIRGIN AND CHILD, WITH ST. JEROME AND ST. DOMINIC"
(NATIONAL GALLERY)
This, the centre panel, shows the Virgin seated in the midst of a landscape, with the Infant Christ at her breast. On the left kneels St. Jerome clasping in his upraised hands a stone, with which he is about to beat his bare breast ; on the right kneels St. Dominic reading in a book and holding his emblem the lily. In the background are various incidents from the life of St. Jerome. The predella is a Pietà with half figures of the Magdalen and St. Francis at either side. At the extreme ends are the arms of the Rucellai family, for whom the picture was painted.
Painted in tempera on wood. Centre panel 6 ft. 9 in. h. x 6 ft. 1 in. w.(2.056 x 1.853).
Predella 8 in. h. x 7 ft. 9 in. w. (0.203 x 2.361).

[113] Giovanna degli Albizzi, at the time she was married to Lorenzo Tornabuoni, had been painted by Botticelli, and her features immortalised thereby in superb frescoes wrought by him for the Villa Lemmi, and passed out of sight under the whitewash of neglect until some thirty years or so ago, when they were discovered, on the whitewash being taken away, and were removed to the Louvre, where they are now one of France's most prized treasures. Giovanna Tornabuoni was fortunate indeed in her limners, for her portrait by Ghirlandaio, that used to hang on loan in the National Gallery in London, and has now passed into the possession of Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan, is one of the supreme achievements in the whole portraiture of the Italian Renaissance. The pure and exquisite profile, marked with all that strange grace and haunting distinction so inherent to the age, shows the ideal lady of quality who called forth the Florentine poet's praises when the fourteen-hundreds were at their full.

Amongst what were destined to be the last works from Ghirlandaio's hand, was the large panel of the Visitation at the Louvre, painted for Lorenzo Tornabuoni the year after his beautiful Giovanna died-for it is dated 1491 -impressive in its simplicity, and treated with rare and noble grandeur of conception.

In the Louvre also is the panel of the famous Portrait of a Bottle-nosed Man and Child, painted by Ghirlandaio as though to prove that a poet could paint ugliness with realistic force, and yet convey the exquisite tenderness that lies in the affection of a child, blind to the defects of the thing it loves ; and with what exquisite gifts Ghirlandaio achieved his art, the wide world has proved by its homage to the grace and charm whereby the winsome child wins its way into our affections with its love for the tender-hearted man whose affectionate eyes peep through so plain a mask.

It has been charged against Ghirlandaio that his art is weak in religious sentiment and in poetic imagination. [114] The word " poetic " is all too much an affair of cheapness. No man is an artist unless he be a poet. Poet is but the label for an artist in words ; artist but the label for a poet in colour or form. But in imagination Ghirlandaio, though he may not have been compelling, was certainly not lacking, as his colour-sense fully reveals. His decorative sense was glowing and most markedly personal, and there is in all he did the well-bred sense of elegance. He, like Botticelli, Benozzo Gozzoli, and the painters of his age, has left us a rich store of portraiture of the great folk of the late fourteen-hundreds.

Ghirlandaio was to be cut off in the height of his career. He died suddenly, falling a victim to the plague of 1494, in his forty-fifth year, and his dust rests in the church of Santa Maria Novella, which his hand's skill did so much to adorn.

GHIRLANDAIO'S ARTIST KINSMEN

There is a charming painting, Portrait of a Girl, in the National Gallery in London, delightfully tinged with Ghirlandaio's quaint fancy, and long set down to Ghirlandaio's credit ; it is now challenged as more likely to have been the work of BASTIANO MAINARDI, Ghirlandaio's brother-in-law;-whether so or not, the painting of the girl's fair hair is exquisite. Both of Domenico del Ghirlandaio's brothers, DAVID and BENEDETTO BIGORDI, were painters and assistants to Ghirlandaio, though they never reached to his gifts. And Ghirlandaio's son RIDOLFO (1483-1561) is said to have completed the painting of the draperies on Raphael's La Belle Fardinière. This Ridolfo learnt his craft as pupil to FRANCESCO GRANACCI, who had been pupil to his father Ghirlandaio.

[115]

CHAPTER XIV

OF THE SON OF A FRIAR AND A NUN

BUT to get back to the masters of the age, the contemporaries of Botticelli and Ghirlandaio ; the greatest of Botticelli's pupils was

FILIPPINO LIPPI
1457 - 1504

Filippino Lippi, " Little Philip Lippi," the love-child of Fra Filippo Lippi and Lucrezia Buti, the nun, was born at Prato in 1457, amidst the scandal of the place. The worldly friar died when the child was but twelve years old, the boy passing to the care of FRA DIAMANTE, who had been the friar's fellow-worker and humble partner in his artistry. The reckless friar seems, indeed, to have kept the affection of the scandalised monks of his order. The lad Filippino Lippi soon thereafter was working in the studio of Botticelli, and the art of Botticelli reveals its influence over all that the son of his own master was to give to the world. Filippino Lippi's early work is so absolutely founded upon the art of his master, that his name has undoubtedly been given to several of Botticelli's paintings -and is still so given even in one or two of the great galleries, though there is much disputing thereon by the scientific writers upon art. Several paintings by Botticelli are given to Filippino Lippi in the National Gallery in London.

In 1480, his twenty-third year, Filippino Lippi was [116] appointed to paint his Vision of St. Bernard in the Badia at Florence, and had thus early made considerable reputation-his achievement greatly increased it ; for, four years thereafter, in 1484, his twenty-seventh year, Filippino Lippi was appointed to finish the frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel of the Carmine Church which had been left incomplete by Masaccio at his early death half a century before, and the young fellow adapted his gifts with astonishing judgment to utter an art in tune with that of the great dead master.

Three years after he began his work upon the Brancacci Chapel, in 1487, his thirtieth year, Filippino Lippi had won the approval of Filippo Strozzi, who chose him to paint the famous and superb, if flamboyant, frescoes in the Chapel of the Strozzi Family at Santa Maria Novella in Florence, which have for motive the lives of St. John the Baptist and of St. Philip, his patron's patron-saint.

He wrought upon these frescoes for fifteen years, until he was forty-five, a couple of years before his death, on the 18th of April 1504.

The world-famous painting of the Virgin and Child, with St. Jerome and St. Dominic, in the National Gallery in London, is of the supreme achievement of Filippino Lippi's art. Beautiful and gracious in treatment, glowing and golden in colour, it advances the art of painting in its depth and exquisite harmonies. Painted for the Rucellai Chapel, in the church of San Pancrazio at Florence, it was afterwards taken to the Palazzo Rucellai, where it hung until sold to Britain in 1857, in its complete form, including its Predella, on the ends of which are the arms of the Rucellai family, whence it is sometimes known as the Rucellai Madonna. The golden landscape, painted with a glorious sense of atmosphere, tells the story of the lion and the ass, [117] holding the legend of St. Jerome in exquisitely rendered restraint. The whole conception reveals Filippino Lippi at the height of his powers, thrusting forward the art of the last years of the fourteen-hundreds towards its modern development.

He thrice again reached nearly to this astounding accomplishment-in the Vision of St. Bernard at the Badia; in the tondo of the Virgin and Child, with St. John, St. Joseph, and St. Margaret, now in the Warren collection at Boston in the United States ; and in the Altarpiece in the Church of S. Spinto at Florence.

In the year 1504, that was to see the death of Filippino Lippi at forty-seven, there had just been finished the statue of David by Michelangelo, now grown to ever-increasing fame, on the edge of his thirtieth year.

That Filippino Lippi was held in high honour in the Florence of his day is proved by the fact that he was one of the jury called together to settle the site on which Michelangelo's great statue of David was to stand.

In the church of S. Maria Sopra Minerva at Rome, where Galileo was later to sign his famous recantation, Filippino Lippi painted a Triumph of St. Thomas Aquinas.

Of Filippino Lippi's pupils, two were of the name of Raffaelo, and a third Raffaelo of the same time adds confusion, especially as all three were sons of Bartolommeos. Raffaelo, called RAFFAELLINO DEL GARBO (1466-1524), has much of the delicacy and charm of Lorenzo di Credi ; and several of Filippino Lippi's works have been credited to him. His chief works are a Virgin and Child at Berlin ; an altarpiece at S. Spirito, Florence ; and a Resurrection in the Academy at Florence. RAFFAELO DE' CAPPONI, another pupil of Filippino Lippi, is best known by his altarpiece in S. Maria Nuova at Florence. RAFFAELO DE' CARLI was [118] a painter of a style akin to that of Perugino, and is best known by his altar-piece (1502) in the Corsini Palace at Florence.

Filippino Lippi, whose face we know from his well-known self-portrait at the Uffizi, shows in his features much of the significance of his art. Already, as the bells of Florence rang out the fourteen-hundreds, the astounding achievement of Florence in art was showing hints of that love of the flamboyant that men call baroque, that tendency to over-ornamentation and elaboration of detail inherent in the Florentine liking for detail even in its superb genius. This elaboration is a threat that easily overbalances into vulgarity, and much of the work of Filippino Lippi, as in the great frescoes at the Santa Maria Novella, held even more than a threat, with their over-insistence on details of draperies and Roman trophies upon over-elaborate buildings in his backgrounds. Already that danger of the baroque is come into Italy, led thereto by the hand of this greatly gifted man. It is when he paints his exquisite landscapes for scenery that the beautiful lands of Tuscany bring him to his supreme endeavour. He showed rare gifts of design and spacing, and he could paint his figures therein with large and dignified skill ; but he was all too prone to forsake the large and simple breadth so beloved of the genius of his century, and to reject the winsome, delicate and ethereal types for less spiritual ideals, and to get lost in a restless and bizarre confusion of elaborate ornament and arrangement.

Therein he but voiced the Florence of his day. As the Renaissance in Italy reached towards 1500, the Greek spirit, that had brought doubt into the land, had triumphed, and worldly ideals of worldly success had wrecked the simpler [119] ideals of an earlier faith. The saints and madonnas still held the centre of the canvas, but swiftly the simplicity was going out of them, and a new significance, the breath of science, was withering their ancient freshness. Sincerity in art was flitting from the church, to be replaced by sumptuous splendour in the palaces of the great, leaving a handsome husk behind-for the Great demanded magnificence and the strut before the people. The artist was losing touch with the people, clambering out of the church, and glorifying the sumptuous homes of the greatly rich.

The United Italy of which Dante dreamed, under an Italian Emperor at Rome, was not to be. The people were never united-never aimed at union. And their several arts were as far apart as though they had been alien nations. The art of Florence is the mirror of the age. Cosimo de' Medici was its great patron. The merchant princes were its nurses. They were the puppets of their age. The Medici encouraged the sensual and worldly tastes of the people, lured them away from sacred to profane subjects, impelled by the desire to lull them into love of splendour and glory of their chiefs rather than to brood on stern republicanism. It was their deliberate and calculated policy to enslave Florence. Lorenzo de' Medici flaunted his magnificence, deliberately enfeebling the people by luxury, enjoying voluptuous living himself, finding wide popularity therein, and seeing that, beside its glamour, stern republicanism looked grey to the people. The artists were not backward in suiting their art to the questionable taste of their patrons. It is true that Botticelli became in the end a " pious one," but " in many houses he painted roundels with his own hand, and of naked women plenty." It was against the decay of the public spirit by paganism, and the loss of republicanism in Florence, that Savonarola fought [120] the tyrants in his own church, defied the very Pope, scorned the princes of Florence, attacked works of art, and died at the stake for it. The " prophet of S. Marco " may have seen with narrow eyes when he misjudged the real significance of Art and of the Renaissance ; but he made no mistake when he attacked the debasing influences of the Renaissance, even whilst he missed its mighty impulses -for the Medici approved the debasing influences, and came to tyranny thereby.