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Filippo Lippi

Filippo Lippi

A painter. A brilliant artist. A story of Filippo Lippi (1406 – 1469). It's too much to be one of the first to understand the revolutionary capacity of Masaccio, who died young and single at just 27 years old.

The little survivors make faith in the convent of Carmine in Florence, and the so-called Madonna Trivulzio, now in Milan. That's enough of observing how the figure dominates the area and reflected a light that is never, clearly from the Renaissance.

He celebrates his splendid representation of Madonna, between the most sensual and delicate that have never been pained and that are the virtue of many among the most important museums in the world. We only summon the splendid Annunciazione that can be found in the church of San Lorenzo in Florence, with its rigorous perspective. Or the paintings at La Louvre in Paris, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Gemaldegal in Berlin, the uffitzi's, Pitti Palace in Florence, Poldi Pezzoli Museum in Milan and many more.

Filippo Lippi has the capacity to absorb the lessons quite well for the Flemish picture, like a testimony for the Madonna di Corneto Tarquinia, kept in the Barberini Museum in Rome, with his very detailed acclimatization in a bed and with his book placed delicately on his arm of the throne of Vergine.

There are full length paintings in the light that Filippo demonstrates dominating with great mastery. Like in the big Incoronazione della Vergine which today is at the Uffizi, that remains as another piece of contemporary art: like those of Beato Angelico that he had hardly finished in the Florentine convent of San Marco.

Florence, nowadays, is a crossroad of experiences, a place of encounter and elaboration on this authentic revolution but not just of art, but of the same conception of the man that went under the name of the Renaissance. An experience where the same artist's assets in the Tuscan city differentiate in Italy and beyond the Alps. Filippo Lippi is the same, after having frescoed the Prato cathedral, he finished his days working at Spoleto in Umbria.

A great painter, therefore, who is known with such justice. But him, who was successful at representing faces of the Vergine, were among the most well known for their delicateness and freshness, he was also a man. And he was in the more full sense at the end. Soon after he remained an orphan, it happened like many times, Filippo dressed in monastic clothes and, probably, became a priest. He announced the votes in the Carmine convent, where, straight after, he could see Masaccio paint the Cappella Brancacci. At what seemed, however, like a religious life, he did not succeed in abolishing those features of her figure that had to distinguish her existence, until it became an authentic obsession: the attraction towards the representatives of the other sex.

He narrates the authentication for a mine of information on the great figure of art which is Vasari, that, when it was taken for a woman, Lippo did not succeed in thinking anything else, just neglected the picture. Otherwise the same one had to notice the Cosimo de'Medici, its large patron to admire, to withhold it from such proposal, its been thought to lock it away in the inside of his palace. But Lippi, so taken from the fury loving, with a pair of scissors cut the bed sheet in strips and knotted them on the windows and it was not seen again for many years. Always, according to Vasari, those whose bad habits, in the end, had fatal results. So much so he died by being poisoned by the relatives of another woman.

But the event had really conditioned his existence that had been in 1456. Filippo had found himself in Prato for important work. The abbess of the convent of Santa Margherita, where the religious painter was chaplain, he thought to ask him to pint a table for the main alter in the church, representing Madonna and other saints. It's useless t say that Lippo, was beyond painting dearly like he knew very well how to do, he put his eyes immediately on a nun, the very young Lucrezia Buti. It was a strike of lightening, one of those to which the artist, by now he must have been about 50, he was well accustomed. And so he made the devil of a monk from convincing the inexpert nun (in front of the entrance to the convent, he needed to find, her family, like it happened the same in those times) to escape from the monastery and then go to see her house. Very soon, she was caught up by her sister Spinetta, also a nun. It was a scandal, also if the abbess, for a good name in the monastery, looked to spread a veil of silence in the vicinity. Much more so, that immediately afterwards, the fruit of guilt came out, that Filippino Lippi, on his turn, will become a very talented and famous painter.
However it seems that, its such a complicated thing, a pair of years after the two sisters repented and they re-entered the convent. But escaping a second time to shelter himself in Lippi's room. That which, this time, cannot avoid a public denunciation.

Fortunately, thanks to the participation by Cosimo de'Medici and of father Pio II Piccolomini, a large man and an art lover, the two lovers were released on votes ad finally married. Filippo had but renounced his deriving return into his loaded religion and also accepted long work from his native land, like Storie della Vergine in the Spoleto cathedral that was constructed as one of his great masterpieces. And where, like we have already said, he was at the end of his days so then he was buried.

He will his own son, Filippino Lippi, he appointed of Lorenzo il Magnifico, to carry out the funeral for his father. And this will be the beginning of another talent of art. But at this time, that's another story.

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