The Importance of Filippo Lippi

For a Gothic-trained artist arriving in Florence in the mid-1440s Filippo Lippi had much to offer. More than any other major painter, he was responsible for reinterpreting Gothic traditions to suit Renaissance sensibilities. It is difficult today to do full justice to the brilliance of his achievement, so essential to defining Medicean taste, for we are conditioned to measure Renaissance art in terms of the grave, grand manner of Masaccio—"puro sanza ornato" ("plain and clear") in the words of Cristoforo Landino—or of the dazzlingly expressive antiquarianism of Donatello's sculpture.30 There would seem to be little room for the winsome, gilded beauty and delicate sensibility Lippi explored. In a highly influential article of 1952, the great Italian critic Roberto Longhi characterized the 1440s as a period of crisis in Florentine art and dismissed what he saw as Lippi's "stubborn descent on a downhill slope of coarse academicism." To Longhi's way of thinking, Lippi had simply not lived up to the promise of his early work, when, according to Vasari, it seemed as though "Masaccio's spirit had entered Fra Filippo's body."

Even allowing for Longhi's love of striking polemical positions and his desire to put Domenico Veneziano at center stage, this judgment seems hard to sustain. Kenneth Clark described the change observable in Lippi's art of the 1440s more benignly: "Fra Filippo, having attempted the Masacciesque with desperate uncertainty, had recognized that he was gifted for line rather than mass, grace rather than grandeur."31 This oversimplified and insufficiently probing summation at least has the virtue of characterizing Lippi's art in terms that fifteenth-century critics would recognize. In contrast to these twentieth-century views, we might quote the verdict of one well-informed observer at the close of the fifteenth century, for whom Filippo Lippi was, quite simply, "the most outstanding master of his time" ("il più singulare maestro di tempo suoi").32

During the 1430s Filippo Lippi had been open to more currents than any other Florentine painter. Quite apart from the firsthand experience of watching Masaccio at work in the Brancacci Chapel of the Carmine, where Lippi took his vows as a Carmelite friar in 1421, he was among the very first artists to respond to Netherlandish painting.33 His interest in the description of everyday objects, whether the furniture of a domestic interior or an isolated vase half filled with water—as in his Annunciation (fig. 13) in the church of San Lorenzo—was directly inspired by a work such as Jan van Eyck's so-called Lucca Madonna (Städelsches Kunstinstitut und Städtische Galerie, Frankfurt). His landscapes, such as the one seen through a window in the Portrait of a Woman and a Man at a Casement (cat. 4) or the setting of his Meeting of Joachim and Anna at the Golden Gate (cat. 5), would be inconceivable without Netherlandish painting, and we need not wonder that they left a lasting impression on Fra Carnevale. No other Florentine artist explored the ways in which cast shadows could be used not simply to create an effect of verisimilitude but to suggest erudite, literary allusions (see cat. 3, 4). He was not a painter of sunlight, a master of pale colors bathed in the light of the early afternoon, in the vein of Domenico Veneziano's Saint Lucy Altarpiece (fig. 21 and cat. 22a, b): a pittore di luce, to use Luciano Bellosi's suggestive epithet.34 Rather, like Leonardo da Vinci, for whom Lippi's paintings of the late 1430s were an important point of reference, he avoided the harshness sunlight confers on forms, preferring the soft light of an interior, since works painted under these conditions "are tender and every kind of face becomes graceful. . . . Too much light gives crudeness; too little prevents our seeing. The medium is best."35 In works such as the 1437 Tarquinia Madonna (Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica, Palazzo Barberini, Rome) the Barbadori Altarpiece (fig. 14), of 1437–39 (?), and, to a lesser degree, the triptych divided between the Metropolitan Museum and the Accademia Albertina (see cat. 1a–c), Lippi became the first exponent of a chiaroscuro approach to modeling form, with gold reduced to occasional embellishment on the wings of angels or the embroidery of a piece of clothing or the scattered dots of a halo.36 Yet, he did not have the analytical mind of Leonardo nor the mathematical inclinations of Piero della Francesca. Just as, ultimately, he was unwilling to sacrifice to a nascent concept of tonal unity the medieval artist's association of beauty with pure color, so for him architecture provided the means of imposing an abstract order on a composition rather than of creating a commensurable space. Only rarely did he employ architecture to create a static, Albertian backdrop or stage. This paradoxical outlook made Lippi uniquely receptive to Donatello's unorthodox architectural forms and his brilliant manipulation of space to enhance the emotional impact of his work. It is only one more of the contradictory aspects of Lippi's approach that, occasionally, he was also open to Luca della Robbia's serene classicism as well as to the architectural vocabulary of Brunelleschi.37

This imaginatively exploited tension between artifice and naturalistic effects, or between fancy and reason (fantasia and disciplina),38 culminates in the great Coronation of the Virgin (fig. 2) painted between 1439 and 1447 for the Benedictine convent of Sant'Ambrogio. Documenting a pivotal moment in Lippi's career, the altarpiece brings to a close the more naturalistic experiments of the 1430s and announces the new emphasis on artifice, crucial to understanding his later paintings. In this work a highly compartmentalized space is created by the device of a multilevel throne of extravagantly bizarre architecture: A medley of classically derived motifs is used in a profoundly unclassical manner. The figures, variously scaled according to their iconographical importance—the Virgin, Saint John the Baptist (patron of the donor), and Saint Ambrose (patron saint of the church) being the largest—are packed into their assigned positions in ways that can defy rational analysis, so unexpectedly does the floor level shift throughout the picture. At the same time, the figures are all illuminated by a low-lying light from the left, and the long shadows cast on the marble pavement create the illusion of something experienced rather than imagined. So also does Lippi's attempt to depict the figures as though seen from slightly above, in keeping with the high vanishing point. That these seeming contradictions are intentional rather than accidental is made clear by a number of details that serve to collapse the fiction of spatial recession. A long embroidered band worn by God the Father and held aloft by two angels to either side of the throne extends downward to two additional angels. Yet, the latter are positioned too far forward to realistically perform their duty. Moreover, behind them is suspended a long swag impossibly attached to a projecting architectural element from which giant lilies spiral upward, their flowers seeming to blend with those held by angels in the rearmost row of the stalls. In a similar space-denying way, the scroll unfurled by the foremost angel, who mysteriously emerges from a cavity at the front of the picture—a feature derived from Donatello's stucco roundels in the Old Sacristy—all but touches the folded hands of the donor, shown farther back, kneeling in a curiously sunken area. It is typical of Lippi that a relatively simple, cubic space should be so elaborately deconstructed by decorative details or actions extended across the picture plane rather than receding in depth. Color is sometimes treated in terms of chiaroscuro to enhance the impression of weight and volume—indeed, few other pictures painted before the 1470s can match the effects Lippi achieves in the standing figures in the foreground that frame the composition. In other places, however, the colors are left saturated. This double use of color can be found even in a number of Lippi's most audaciously composed works of the early 1440s. For example, it has frequently been noted how, in Lippi's Annunciation in San Lorenzo (fig. 13), the building at the far end, in deep perspective, is brightly colored so as to relate to the drapery and wings of the angels in the left foreground. In the Coronation of the Virgin the rainbow-like bands of blue defining the heavenly spheres add another note of unreality that would have been further enhanced by the frame—alas, lost, as are the frames of all of Lippi's altarpieces, but documented as being remarkably rich in the Gothic panoply of pinnacles. "Fra Filippo Lippi's work possessed grace and was ornate and exceedingly skillful; he was very good at composition and variety, at coloring and creating a relief-like impression and at decorative embellishments of every kind, whether imitated from reality or invented."39 This apt appraisal by Cristoforo Landino might have been written with the Coronation of the Virgin in mind, and it underscores the importance of what Michael Baxandall has called "the period eye" in understanding the complexity of Lippi's art.

The Coronation of the Virgin is pivotal precisely because of the ways in which it looks both forward and backward. The issue of naturalistic description first elaborated on in the Tarquinia Madonna is brought to a level of extraordinary subtlety, but there are also the seeds of Lippi's most remarkably Gothicizing paintings—such as the Alessandri Altarpiece (fig. 15), with its gold background, delicately elongated figures in pink cloaks, and donors shown in miniature. With the single exception of Donatello, no other artist had such an inventive attitude toward the past.40 Lippi reintroduces gold into his work, but he makes it respond to the logic of uniform illumination: Sometimes its shining surface is glazed to obtain shadows, or it may be concentrated in the highlights of a decorative hem; at other times gold dots are combined with white ones and sprinkled judiciously over a form so that they effectively model the surface. The Virgin is sometimes clothed in pale blue and pink—as though she had stepped out of an altarpiece by Fra Angelico. Dark, wooded landscapes are at once suggestive of a specific site and, deprived of sunlight and sky, become as haunting—and symbolically rich—as the selva oscura that Dante found himself in at the opening of the Divina commedia. In the third book of his treatise on painting, Alberti famously defined the task of the painter as "to so describe with lines and paint with colors on a panel or wall the surfaces of any body that can be seen so that from a fixed distance and fixed central position they will seem to have volume and be very like the actual thing." Lippi was well aware of Alberti's ideas, but he rejected this overly rationalized notion of painting as mimesis, preferring to emphasize artifice as the measure of creativity and the means by which a Gothic past could be reconciled with a newly revived classical present. It was a lesson crucial to his disciples.

Of the art of Filippo Lippi's most famous pupil, Botticelli, Daniel Arasse has written that the coherence of his art resides "in the distance the artist has put between himself and the search for illusionistic effects through the imitation of nature. . . . Botticelli never dissimulates his art as art; he never camouflages that it is an artifice, that it constructs an artificial representation of the reality it imitates."41 This modern assessment of Botticelli is perfectly in line with Landino's appraisal of Lippi—"gratioso et ornato et artificioso sopra modo." In understanding the remarkable way in which Lippi adapts his style to various commissions—whether for a splendidly Renaissance sacra conversazione for the novitiate chapel in Santa Croce (fig. 4), a Gothicizing altarpiece for the king of Naples (commissioned through Giovanni de'Medici in 1457), or that masterpiece of refined delicacy, the Annunciation, for the Benedictine nuns at Le Murate (fig. 5)—it is important to bear in mind the interplay they promote of innate genius (ingenio and fantasia) manipulating a mastered style (maniera).42