Artist of the day: Artist of the Day, November 10, 2025 : Filippino Lippi, an Italian Renaissance painter (#2414)

Monday, November 10, 2025

Artist of the Day, November 10, 2025 : Filippino Lippi, an Italian Renaissance painter (#2414)

Filippino Lippi (1457 – 1504) was an Italian Renaissance painter mostly working in Florence, Italy during the later years of the Early Renaissance and first few years of the High Renaissance. He also worked in Rome for a period from 1488, and later in the Milan area and Bologna.

He worked in oils, tempera and fresco, mostly painting religious subjects, with a few portraits and secular allegories or scenes from classical mythology.
Biography

Filippino Lippi was born at Prato, Tuscany, the illegitimate son to Lucrezia Buti and the painter Fra Filippo Lippi. The couple had both broken vows of celibacy, and though after Filippino's birth they received a papal dispensation to marry (arranged by Lorenzo di Medici), Vasari says that they never did.

Filippino first trained under his father in his workshop. They moved to Spoleto, where Filippino served as workshop assistant during the construction of Spoleto Cathedral. When his father died in 1469, Filippino was aged twelve and was among the assistants to his father who completed the frescoes with Storie della Vergine ("Life of the Virgin") in the cathedral.

Filippino later completed his apprenticeship in the workshop of Botticelli, who had been a pupil of Filippino's father. In the 1472 records of the Painters' guild it is noted that Botticelli had only Filippino Lippi as an assistant, and that he was living in his master's house. The two artists often worked together on the same project. The shared works include the panels belonging to a later dismantled pair of cassoni, the panels being now divided among the Louvre, the National Gallery of Canada, the Musée Condé in Chantilly, and the Galleria Pallavicini in Rome. Works by Botticelli and Filippino from these years include many paintings of the Madonna and Child which are often difficult to distinguish from one another.

Filippino's early solo works greatly resemble those of Botticelli, but perhaps with less sensitivity and subtlety. The first ones (dating from 1475 onward) were attributed to an anonymous "Amico di Sandro" (i.e. "Friend of Botticelli"), a term introduced by Bernard Berenson in 1899, though by 30 years later Berenson's "lists" ascribed most of them to Lippi.

Together with Perugino (another pupil of his father), Ghirlandaio, and Botticelli, Filippino Lippi worked on the decoration of Lorenzo de' Medici's villa at Spedaletto. On 31 December 1482, he was commissioned to decorate a wall of the Sala dell'Udienza of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, a work never begun.

Soon after, probably in 1483–84, he was called to complete Masaccio's decoration of the Brancacci Chapel in the Santa Maria del Carmine di Firenze. There Filippino painted Stories of Saint Peter, in the following frescoes.

Filippino Lippi's work on the Sala degli Otto di Pratica, in the Palazzo Vecchio, was completed on 20 February 1486. It is now in the Uffizi Gallery. At about this time, Piero di Francesco del Pugliese asked him to paint the altarpiece with the Apparition of the Virgin to St. Bernard, which is now in the Badia Fiorentina, Florence. This is Filippino Lippi's most popular painting: a composition of unreal items, with its very particular elongated figures, backed by a phantasmagorical scenario of rocks and almost anthropomorphic trunks.

On 21 April 1487, Filippo Strozzi asked him to decorate the Strozzi family chapel in Santa Maria Novella with Stories of St. John Evangelist and St. Philip. He worked on this commission on and off over a long time. He only completed it in 1503, after Strozzi's death. The windows with musical themes, in the same chapel, also designed by Filippino, were completed between June and July 1503. These paintings have been considered as influenced by the political and religious crisis in Florence at the time: the theme of the fresco, the clash between Christianity and Paganism, was hotly debated during those years and in connection with the friar Girolamo Savonarola.

In 1488, now in his early thirties, Lippi went to Rome, where Lorenzo de' Medici had advised Cardinal Oliviero Carafa to entrust him with the decoration of the family chapel in Santa Maria sopra Minerva. The frescoes he produced there show a new inspiration, different from his earlier works, but confirm Lippi's continued research on the themes of the classical era. He completed the series by 1493.

Filippino worked away from his home town, at the Certosa di Pavia, a Carthusian monastery or Charterhouse located outside Pavia, and also in Prato, where, in 1503, he completed the Tabernacle of the Christmas Song, now in the City Museum. In 1501 Lippi painted the Mystic Wedding of St. Catherine for the Basilica of San Domenico in Bologna.

Lippi's final work was the Deposition for the Santissima Annunziata church in Florence, a work which was left unfinished at his death.

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