Vasari: Filippo Lippi

Madonna and Child Google Art Project

Many Renaissance painters made the relation between Mary and child and that of a real mother and baby. Filippo Lippi’s Madonna and Child with Two Angels  (1460 - 1465) is one of the most beautiful paintings of the Florentine Renaissance, a daring example of the humanizing of religion that goes back to Giotto and his Arena Chapel in Padua. Vasari himself praises Lippi, saying that he "was so highly esteemed for his good qualities that the many other blameworthy things he did were compensated for by his rare talent."

The Virgin Mary Google Art project

Created for the Villa of Poggio Imperiale, this tempura on wood panel is truly one of Lippi’s greatest works. Unlike previous similar works, the Virgin is not holding the child; instead he is being held up to her, almost in a sort of offering, by two angels. Lippi actually is believed to model his Madonna on Lucrezia, a former nun whom he persuaded to run away with him after he fell in love with her while painting another portrait of her as the Virgin Mary.  Although they never married, Lucrezia bore him two children, a son and a daughter. Lippi’s love for Lucrezia is evident in the care and tenderness with which the Virgin in painted. Her sculpted face, the shadows playing on her cheek, her bowed nose and strong lips - all is crisply yet tenderly seen. Her beauty is undeniable; the large pearl over her meticulously arranged hair and a string of pearls receding back from her forehead create a striking triangle.

Filippino Google Art Project

In the painting, two angels present Christ to Mary, one of which, in the foreground, smiles out towards the viewer. This angel in the foreground is believed to be the son of Lucrezia and Lippi, Filippino. What further sets this painting apart from other Madonna and child works is the setting. Instead of portraying Madonna on a grandiose throne, Lippi has her sitting on a fifteenth century Florentine chair. Her elegant garments and rich jewels further the idea that the Madonna is in fact being posed in a modern Florentine home. It is this action of clothing the figures in contemporray wear that, accroding to Vasari, "began to encourage others to abandomn a simplicity that can more readily be termed old-fashioned in keeping with the style of antiquity." The jewels in her hair and on her dress are reflective of the secular part of Florence, a world which Lippi himself embraced when he quit the monastery.  Overall the composition of the piece from the landscape outside of the window, which illuminates Mary, to the foreground containing the figures, truly set this piece apart from the multitude of other religious Renaissance paintings. As Vasari says in The Lives, Lippi "in short was such a great painter that in his own day no one surpassed him and only a few have done so in our own times."