Non mihi sit laudi quod eram velut alter Apelles,
sed quod lucra tuis omnia, Christe, dabam;
altera nam terris opera extant, altera coelo.
urbs me loannem Flos tulit Etruriae:—
“Let it not be to my praise that I was as another Apelles, but that I gave all my gains, O Christ, to your faithful; for some works are for the earth, some for heaven. I, Giovanni, was a child of the Tuscan City of Florence.”
3. Fra Filippo Lippi
From the gentle Angelico, crossed with the lusty Masaccio, came the art of a man who preferred life to eternity. Filippo, son of the butcher Tommaso Lippi, was born in Florence in a poor street behind the convent of the Carmelites. Orphaned at two, he was reluctantly reared by an aunt, who rid herself of him when he was eight by entering him into the Carmelite order. Instead of studying the books assigned to him he covered their margins with caricatures. The prior, noting their excellence, set him to drawing the frescoes that Masaccio had just painted in the Carmelite church. Soon the lad was painting frescoes of his own in that same church; they have disappeared, but Vasari thought them as good as Masaccio’s. At the age of twenty-six (1432) Filippo left the monastery; he continued to call himself Fra, brother, friar, but he lived in the “world” and supported himself by his art. Vasari tells a story that tradition has accepted, though we cannot test its truth.
Filippo is said to have been so amorous that when he saw a woman who pleased him he would have given all his possessions to have her; and if he could not succeed in this he quieted the flame of his love by painting her portrait. This appetite so took possession of him that while the humor lasted he paid little or no attention to his work. Thus, on one occasion when Cosimo was employing him, he shut him up in the house so that he might not go out and waste time. Filippo remained so for two days; but, overcome by his amorous and bestial desires, he cut up his sheet with a pair of scissors, and letting himself out of the window, devoted many days to his pleasures. When Cosimo could not find him he caused a search to be made for him, until at length Filippo returned to his labors. From that time forward Cosimo gave him liberty to go and come as he chose, repenting that he had shut him up… for, he said, geniuses are celestial forms and not pack asses…. Ever afterward he sought to hold Filippo by the bonds of affection, and was thus served by him with greater readiness.49
In 1439 “Fra Lippo” described himself, in a letter to Piero de’ Medici, as the poorest friar in Florence, living with, and supporting with difficulty, six nieces anxious to be married.50 His work was in demand, but apparently not as well paid as the nieces wished. His morals could not have been notoriously bad, for we find him engaged to paint pictures for various nunneries. At the convent of Santa Margherita in Prato (unless Vasari and tradition err) he fell in love with Lucrezia Buti, a nun or a ward of the nuns; he persuaded the prioress to let Lucrezia pose for him as the Virgin; soon they eloped. Despite her father’s reproaches and appeals she remained with the artist as his mistress and model, sat for many Virgins, and gave him a son, the Filippino Lippi of later fame. The wardens of the cathedral at Prato did not hold these adventures against Filippo; in 1456 they engaged him to paint the choir with frescoes illustrating the lives of St. John the Baptist and St. Stephen. These paintings, now much damaged by time, were acclaimed as masterpieces: perfect in composition, rich in color, alive with drama—coming to a climax on one side of the choir with the dance of Salome, on the other with the stoning of Stephen. Filippo found the task too wearisome for his mobility; twice he ran away from it. In 1461 Cosimo persuaded Pius II to release the artist from his monastic vows; Filippo seems to have thought himself also freed from fidelity to Lucrezia, who could no longer pose as a virgin. The Prato wardens exhausted all schemes for luring him back to his frescoes; at last, ten years after their inception, he was induced to finish them by Carlo de’ Medici, Cosimo’s illegitimate son, now an apostolic notary. In the scene of Stephen’s burial Filippo exercised all his powers—in the deceptive perspective of the architectural background, in the sharply individualized figures surrounding the corpse, and in the stout proportions and calm rotund face of Cosimo’s bastard reading the services for the dead.
Despite his sexual irregularities, and perhaps because of his amiable sensitivity to the loveliness of woman, Filippo’s finest pictures were of the Virgin.* They missed the ethereal spirituality of Angelico’s Madonnas, but they conveyed a deep sense of soft physical beauty and infinite tenderness. In Fra Lippo the Holy Family became an Italian family, surrounded with homely incidents, and the Virgin took on a sensuous loveliness heralding the pagan Renaissance. To these feminine charms Filippo in his Madonnas added an airy grace that passed down to his apprentice Botticelli.
In 1466 the city of Spoleto invited him to tell the story of the Virgin again in the apse of its cathedral. He labored conscientiously, passion having cooled; but his powers failed with his passion, and he could not repeat the excellence of his Prato murals. Amid this effort he died (1469), poisoned, Vasari thought, by the relatives of a girl whom he had seduced. The story is improbable, for Filippo was buried in the Spoleto cathedral; and there, a few years later, his son, on commission from Lorenzo de’ Medici, built for his father a splendid marble tomb.
Everyone who creates beauty deserves remembrance, but we must pass in shameful haste by Domenico Veneziano and his supposed murderer Andrea del Castagno. Domenico was called from Perugia (1439) to paint murals in Santa Maria Nuova; he had as aide a promising youth from Borgo San Sepolcro—Piero della Francesca; and in these works—now lost—he made one of the earliest Florentine experiments with paints mixed in oil. He has left us one masterpiece—the Portrait of a Woman (Berlin) with upswept hair, wistful eyes, obtrusive nose, and bulging bosom. According to Vasari, Domenico taught the new technique to Andrea del Castagno, who was also painting murals in Santa Maria Nuova. Rivalry may have marred their friendship, for Andrea was a dour and passionate man; Vasari tells how he murdered Domenico; but other records relate that Domenico outlived Andrea by four years. Andrea reached fame by his picture of the scourging of Christ, in the cloister of Santa Croce, where his tricks of perspective astonished even his fellow artists. Hidden away in the old monastery of Sant’ Apollonia in Florence are his imaginary portraits of Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Farinata degli Uberti, a vivid representation of the swashbuckler Pippo Spana, and a Last Supper (1450) that seems poorly drawn and lifeless, but may have suggested an idea or two to Leonardo none the less.
VIII. A MISCELLANY
To feel with any vividness the life of art in Cosimo’s Florence we must not only contemplate those major geniuses whom we have here commemorated so hurriedly. We must enter the side streets and alleys of art and visit a hundred shops and studios where potters shaped and painted clay, or glassmakers blew or cut glass into forms of fragile loveliness, or goldsmiths fashioned precious metals or stone into gems and medals, seals and coins, and a thousand ornaments of dress or person, home or church. We must hear noisy intent artisans beating or chasing iron, copper, or bronze into weapons and armor, vessels and utensils and tools. We must watch the cabinet makers designing, carving, inlaying, or surfacing wood; engravers cutting designs into metal; and other workers chiseling chimney pieces, or tooling leather, or carving ivory, or producing delicate textiles to make flesh seductive or adorn a home. We must enter convents and see patient monks illuminating manuscripts, placid nuns stitching storied tapestries. Above all we must picture a population developed enough to understand beauty, and wise enough to give honor, sustenance, and stimulus to those who consumed themselves in its making.