When a painter was buried in Florence in April 1504, every workshop in the city closed its doors for the day. The gesture was extraordinary, and it was paid to Filippino Lippi (probably 1457 - 18 April 1504), an Italian painter of the later Early Renaissance whose working life ran from the age of Botticelli into the opening years of the High Renaissance. He painted in fresco, tempera and oil, mostly for churches, though classical mythology and secular allegory drew him as well.
His beginnings were a scandal. Born at Prato in Tuscany, probably in 1457, he was the illegitimate son of the painter Fra Filippo Lippi and Lucrezia Buti. Both had taken vows of celibacy; both had broken them. Lorenzo de' Medici secured a papal dispensation permitting the couple to marry, though Vasari maintains they never did. A sister, Alessandra, arrived in 1465.
Trained first at home, the boy learned the trade in his father's workshop and followed it to Spoleto, where the elder Lippi had taken on the frescoes for the cathedral. Fra Filippo died in 1469. His son was twelve. Among the assistants who completed the Storie della Vergine on those cathedral walls stood a child finishing his own father's Life of the Virgin.
He served the rest of his apprenticeship with Botticelli, who had himself been Fra Filippo's pupil. Guild records of 1472 note that Botticelli kept a single assistant - Lippi - living in his master's house. The two worked together constantly. Panels from a dismantled pair of cassoni survive from that partnership, now divided among the Louvre, the National Gallery of Canada, the Musée Condé at Chantilly and the Galleria Pallavicini in Rome. The Madonna and Child pictures of these years remain notoriously hard to assign to one hand or the other.
So persuasive was the resemblance that in 1899 Bernard Berenson gathered a body of the early work under an invented personality, the Amico di Sandro, the friend of Sandro. Thirty years later he had returned most of it to Lippi. Between 1480 and 1485 the borrowed manner thinned and something sharper came through. To this stretch belong the Madonnas now in Berlin, London and Washington, the Journeys of Tobias in the Galleria Sabauda at Turin, the Madonna of the Sea in the Galleria dell'Accademia in Florence, and the Histories of Esther.
Florentine patronage came quickly. Alongside Perugino, Ghirlandaio and Botticelli he decorated Lorenzo de' Medici's villa at Spedaletto. On 31 December 1482 he was contracted to paint a wall of the Sala dell'Udienza in the Palazzo Vecchio, a commission never begun. His panel for the Sala degli Otto di Pratica in the same palace was delivered on 20 February 1486 and hangs today in the Uffizi.
Consider what was asked of him around 1483. In the Brancacci Chapel at Santa Maria del Carmine, Masaccio's frescoes had stood incomplete since his death in 1428 - the gravest exercise in linear perspective anywhere in Florence, and Lippi was to finish them. He added the Stories of Saint Peter: the quarrel with Simon Magus before Nero, the Resurrection of the Son of Theophilus, the apostle jailed, his liberation, his crucifixion. He held the scale and the weight of his predecessor without lapsing into pastiche. At the right of the central scene stands the painter himself at twenty-five, turned out towards us, unhurried.
For Piero di Francesco del Pugliese he painted the Apparition of the Virgin to St Bernard, dated 1485-87 and now in the Badia Fiorentina. It has always been his best loved picture. In it we see figures stretched unnaturally long, set among rocks and tree trunks that seem to be turning into limbs. Nothing here quite obeys the daylight world. He worked, too, for Tanai de' Nerli at Santo Spirito.
In 1488, in his early thirties, Lippi left for Rome. Lorenzo de' Medici had recommended him to Cardinal Oliviero Carafa, who wanted his family chapel in Santa Maria sopra Minerva decorated. The frescoes there, finished by 1493, show a mind newly stocked, and confirm how steadily antiquity held his attention. Rome handed him the grottesche, the ornamental language of the excavated Roman interiors, and he never gave it back.
Filippo Strozzi had engaged him on 21 April 1487 for the family chapel at Santa Maria Novella, with Stories of St John the Evangelist and St Philip. He returned to it over sixteen years and completed it only in 1503, after the patron's death. The windows on musical themes, also to his design, were installed between June and July 1503. The antique world is rebuilt there in scrupulous detail, and the mood is thoroughly disquieting. Executioners are given hard, unfeeling faces. In the scene of St Philip driving the monster from the temple, the pagan idol comes alive on its plinth and squares up to the saint. Christianity against paganism was no academic question in the Florence of Savonarola, and these walls carry the argument's heat.
Lippi was back in Florence between 1491 and 1494. From that decade comes the Apparition of Christ to the Virgin of about 1493, now in Munich. Then the Adoration of the Magi of 1496, tempera grassa on wood, painted for San Donato in Scopeto and today in the Uffizi. The Sacrifice of Laocoön followed, for the Medici villa at Poggio a Caiano, along with the St John the Baptist and Mary Magdalene in the Valori Chapel at San Procolo, which owes a clear debt to Luca Signorelli. Commissions took him well beyond Tuscany, to the Certosa di Pavia and to Bologna, where the Mystic Wedding of St Catherine was painted for the Basilica of San Domenico in 1501. In Prato, his birthplace, he completed the Tabernacle of the Christmas Song in 1503; it is now in the city museum. A Deposition for Santissima Annunziata in Florence stood unfinished when he died on 18 April 1504, aged forty-seven.
Perhaps a painter who spent his boyhood completing other men's walls never quite believed a picture belonged to one hand alone. He closed his father's cathedral cycle, then Masaccio's chapel, then a Strozzi commission whose patron had been dead for years. His own last work he began and left to someone else. That habit of arriving late to a wall may explain something his contemporaries did not have: the restlessness, the swarming ornament, the nerves. For centuries he was filed away as a lesser Botticelli. He reads differently now. The strain of the Strozzi Chapel, the half-animate trunks of the Badia altarpiece and the idol stirring on its pedestal look less like decoration than like anxiety made visible, which is why viewers accustomed to unsettling art find Filippino Lippi easier company than the serene century that produced him. Florence knew what it had. The shutters did not come down for nothing.
