The Renaissance of Imagination

The Marriage of Heaven and Earth in Florentine Renaissance Art

Sam Hilt

• Publisher: Tuscany Tours Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780985147952
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

As you make your way through "The Renaissance of Imagination", you'll have the opportunity to explore works by artists from Donatello to Botticelli that span Florence's greatest century of art. But you won't find the usual discussions about the dating of particular works, or why a certain painting is considered "important" in the evolution of Western art, or how much was done by the master and how much by his workshop, or who influenced whom. Instead you'll have the opportunity to contemplate these masterpieces of Florentine art in ways that enable you to appreciate their beauty, depth and brilliance more fully. The facts of history, iconography and biography are fully respected, but it is the works of art themselves that are here given the final word. If the Italian Renaissance has ever captured your interest and fired your imagination, this book has been written for you. (59 Full-color Images)

Having explored several of Fra Angelico’s Annunciation images, let’s turn our attention now to the work of Fra Filippo Lippi, another great monastic painter who thrived in mid-century Florence. As different one from the other as day from night, these two artists may fairly be said to define the extreme limits of religious reverence and irreverence in 15^th century Florentine painting.

Fra Angelico’s work reveals a coherent conception of the Annunciation as a graduated process where the different images of the event that he depicted may be understood to represent phases of a spiritual unfolding. By contrast, Lippi’s Annunciations dazzle us by the sheer richness and variety of their motif, and one looks in vain for a philosophical or theological framework into which they might neatly fit. The settings where the event takes place and the cast of supporting characters who appear on stage change repeatedly, as do the conceptions of the Madonna and the processes by which the divine impregnation is imagined to occur. Here the beams of light sent by God touch her shoulder, there they seem aimed at her heart, elsewhere they are directed toward her womb.⁸¹ Indeed, among Lippi’s surviving Annunciations we find an extraordinary range of approaches to the contemplation and representation of this event, including to some of its more troubling aspects.

* * *

Unlike Fra Angelico, who took his vows willingly in his adult years, Filippo Lippi was constrained as an adolescent to enter monastic life. Whereas Angelico was drawn powerfully toward the sublimity of spiritual life, it is difficult to imagine anyone less temperamentally suited than Lippi for the religious discipline of monastic life. Fra Angelico’s very name reflects an ongoing process of spiritual transmutation. He shed his given name (Guido di Pietro), along with his earthly attachments, when he took his vows and became Fra Giovanni. A fellow Dominican soon after dubbed him “Angelico” and his countrymen have referred to him as Beato Angelico (Blessed Angelico) since Renaissance times (even though his formal beatification occurred only in recent decades). In the years ahead, if an art-loving Cardinal from central Italy someday becomes Pope, there’s an outside chance that Guido di Pietro may become known to posterity as Saint Angelico.

In sharpest contrast to this continuous process of nominative sublimation, Filippo Lippi simply became Fra Filippo Lippi when he took his vows—apparently a highly unusual circumstance. And although he left monastic life in his later years, he continued to sign himself as “Brother Filippo” to the end of his days. These details imply a certain fixity of character, a distinctive style of being oneself in relation to the institutions of religious life. And from this resolute tension between character and life circumstances there emerged a unique artistic vision.

If up to this point we have spoken hardly a word about the personal lives of the artists, the silence has not been due to a dogmatic belief that an artist’s life must be ignored in a critical approach to his art. Rather, it’s because we are precluded from exploring the interplay between the lives and the works of the artists in this period by our profound ignorance of the details of their lives. In the early decades of the Quattrocento, much painterly work was still unsigned. The painter remained, in his own eyes and in the eyes of his patrons, more of a skilled craftsman than a “creative artist” in our modern sense of the term. No one felt it was worth the effort to document the efforts of such men apart from receipts for labor and expenses. So, very little substantive information about the lives of the early Renaissance artists has come down to us. And, when we do reflect upon what we know about men like Brunelleschi, Donatello, or Fra Angelico, there is little reason to assume that they used their art as a vehicle for personal expression. John Shearman’s comment about the eroticism of Donatello’s later statue of David generalizes well: “If I thought that the bronze David told one something about Donatello’s private life, I would say so even on a Sunday afternoon, but I think the opposite.”⁸²

Even in more fertile terrains than that offered by the early Renaissance, studying the artist’s life to “explain” his work rarely leads the spectator into a deeper encounter with the paintings themselves. Instead, it usually tends to provide the viewer with handy clichés about the painter’s madness or his homosexuality or his unhappy childhood. Armed with these catch phrases, the viewer can defend himself or herself from any active engagement with the work itself. In this respect much of the psycho-biographical writing about art has done little more to animate the viewer’s experience of the image than would a Morellian analysis of earlobes.

Nevertheless, these caveats aside, the case of Fra Filippo Lippi presents an exception to the general rule, and to enter into the spirit of his art we need to pay attention to Filippo the man. Jeffrey Ruda, the foremost scholar today of Lippi’s life and achievements and a sensitive reader of his work, has drawn attention to the remarkable fact that Fra Filippo has emerged as a colorful character in an age when only the ghostliest outlines of his peers have survived:

A personality this strong would demand attention in any art-historical context. In the early Renaissance, where personal biography is seldom more than a shadow flickering through the dust of an archive, it can be intoxicating. The romantic stories would not have persisted if the art had not made them seem plausible.⁸³

Lippi the man somehow managed to leave behind enough of a trail to capture the fantasies of later generations. His imagined life has been memorialized in fiction, poetry, and painting, and his work marks the advent of a new level of interplay between the subjects of painting and the artist as a living personality.

When we look at his paintings, we become aware of his earthly personality in its relation to the sacred in a way that has no parallels in the earlier history of art. Late medieval and early Renaissance artists occasionally identify themselves by signing their names on the backs of paintings or upon their frames; or a prominent artist like Duccio might identify himself discretely in decorative script along a stair-step. But no one prior to Lippi draws attention to himself as deliberately within the fictive reality of the painting itself as does Lippi. He paints his own name on a tag that he adds to the base of the throne in the Tarquinia Madonna and Child; he carves it on an ax handle in the Adoration in the Woods; and he even makes daring cameo appearances in some of his formal genre paintings. Lippi’s relation to his work and the play of his own perspective on the topics he renders are thus thematized: his signature presence exists as a dimension of the paintings themselves, actually and metaphorically. Since he invites us to think about him when we look at his paintings, it’s only reasonable to turn to biography as our royal road for further exploration of Fra Filippo’s work.

VASARI’S LIVES

The major source of information about the life of Fra Filippo Lippi, as for so many of the other Renaissance artists, is Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of The Artists, first published in 1550.⁸⁴ Vasari’s work is invaluable because it is often the primary and sometimes the sole source for basic knowledge about the great Renaissance artists and their works. Nevertheless, where modern scholars have been able to find other sources of documentary information, Vasari’s work has occasionally been shown to be either factually incorrect or misleading. Indeed, finding a factual error in one of Vasari’s Lives has almost become a rite of passage for aspiring Renaissance art historians. Hence, in those areas where Vasari remains a sole source, scholars are both immensely grateful for the information he provides and bitterly resentful of the fact that we can’t be absolutely certain of almost anything he says.

The present essay does not seek either to affirm or dispute the facts of Vasari’s treatment of Lippi’s life. Instead, we will approach Vasari from another perspective entirely: we will treat Vasari as a collector and transmitter of legends, a secular successor to the chroniclers of the lives of the saints. If we approach him not as a flawed historian, but, rather, as a faithful hagiographer to the artists, we may be able to perceive the value of his work in a new light.

The Lives of the Artists, then, may be seen as a secular sequel to that thirteenth century classic, The Golden Legend, which collected many of the apocryphal stories about saints and biblical characters that had made the rounds in the immediately preceding centuries. What the Lives really gives us, apart from its factual information about the Florentine art scene, are folktales about the great artists who lived in the previous century. Composed of an assortment of actual facts, half-truths, honest mistakes, and embellishments, Vasari preserves for us those stories which had sufficient vitality to persist in the public mind between the time of the artists’ deaths and his own day. These fantasies about an artist’s life and work which have passed into history certainly can not be confused with biographical facts. Yet, sometimes, key insights into the enduring value of an artist’s legacy may be gleaned from the legends which have been preserved through the centuries. These tell us something about the projected values which the artist has constellated and carried for posterity.

* * *

The facts of Filippo Lippi’s life given to us by Vasari which have been confirmed by other documentary sources may be briefly summarized as follows.⁸⁵ Filippo was born the son of a butcher in a working class district of Florence. Later orphaned, he was subsequently enrolled as a friar in the Carmelite Convent. At some point he became romantically involved with a nun with whom he had a son, Filippino, who became a distinguished painter in his own right. In the later decades of his life he was one of the most highly regarded of all Tuscan painters. He was buried in Spoleto, in a church where he had painted extensive frescoes, within a marble tomb commissioned by Lorenzo de’ Medici.

From additional sources, we know that he was probably fifteen when he took his vows; that the first documented works which show him in full command of his artistic skills date from the late 1430s; that after resolving a legal dispute during the course of which he was imprisoned and tortured, he withdrew from monastic life; that he probably received a dispensation from the Pope to marry and legally adopt his child, and that he died in 1469.

So much for the matters of record. It was not these simple facts, but the apocryphal anecdotes about Lippi’s personality which Vasari provided that effectively launched the career of Filippo Lippi as legend. The Italian art historian, Gloria Fossi, a recent scholar of Lippi’s work, notes that: “Vasari succeeded in creating a legend that is still difficult today to dispel (for example, there is even a Norwegian Rock group that has taken on the name of the sensuous monk).”⁸⁶

One striking thing about Vasari’s anecdotes is their thematic consistency. Vasari paints a picture of Lippi as an artist with a strongly passionate nature whose art plays a distinctive role in relation to his erotic life. We learn, for example, that sometimes Lippi turns to his art when his sexual desires are thwarted:

It is said that Fra Filippo was so lustful that he would give anything t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• Introduction
• Table of Figures
• Openings: Art Therapy in Renaissance Florence
• Quattro Santi Coronati: The Mission Statement of the Sculptors’ Guild
• Donatello’s St. George: Man and Superman
• The Brancacci Chapel: Many Hands at Work
• Gentile da Fabriano’s Adoration of the Magi
• David’s Penis
• Annunciations
• Fra Angelico: Three Stages of Annunciation
• Fra Filippo Lippi: The Monk and the Madonna
• Piero’s Pregnant Madonna
• Botticelli’s Primavera
• Botticelli’s Birth of Venus
• Botticelli’s Annunciation
• Appendices
• Image Work: Art History vs. Art Appreciation
• Further Notes on Image Work
• Imaginal Dialogue
• Transcript of the Trinità Dialogue
• Bibliography
• About the Author