Product Description

This beautiful and compelling book shines new light on Fra Filippo Lippi`s life and career, from his first paintings as a friar to later works painted outside the monastery for the Medicis and other patrons. Focusing on the fascinating conjunction of Lippi`s work as a painter and his experiences as a Carmelite friar, Megan Holmes transforms our understanding of the artist and of art in fifteenth-century Florence.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1508547 in Books
• Published on: 1999-11-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 312 pages

From Library Journal
This scholarly, well-documented book presents a complex view of Renaissance painter Fra Filippo Lippi, who straddled the social order as both a priest in the church and an artist working under Medici patronage. Holmes (art history, Florida State Univ., Florence) focuses on manifold aspects of 15th-century society in Florence. The importance of religious pageants, the frescoes of Massaccio on the walls of Lippi's church, and the ideas of Alberti, Brunelleschi, and Donatello and their significance in Lippi's imagery are all examined. Lippi's relationships to his contemporaries, especially the Dominican Fra Angelico, are also explored, opening a discussion of the differences in the Dominican and Carmelite orders. Though the book is exquisitely produced, with several hundred illustrations in color and black and white, the highly abstract and philosophical level of discourse addresses a scholarly audience, and the book will be of most interest to artists and to serious readers of Florentine social structure.
-Ellen Bates, New York
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
Assess Lippi's lusty biography in the context of 15th-century Florentine religious and artistic life. Holmes establishes that Carmelite religious principles defined Lippi's work long after he abandoned his religious vows and fathered a son. . . . This is an especially gorgeous book with dazzling photos of Lippi's tender, fresh-faced Madonnas and details often difficult to see in the shadowy churches of Spoleto and Florence. -- Minneapolis Star Tribune

Customer Reviews

The Definitive Lippi Study
Holmes' book looks like a sumptuous coffee table art book and is a splendid example of a well produced one. The contents, in addition to the excellent illustrations, add up to an exhaustive and definitive study of Lippi's life and work by setting him firmly in the detailed religious and social context of his time and place. All of the artistic influences on his life are thoroughly catalogued. The significance of Florence's Santa Maria del Carmine is well documented, since it was the site of Lippi'a artistic training as well as his religious formation, and the lasting Carmelite infuences on Lippi's great works are described in great detail. Many historical misconceptions are corrected: Lippi was no orphan; he apparantly never severed completely his membership in the Carmelite Order. There is so much detail in this marvelous book, I wanted more informatoin about what happened to Lucrezia Buti and her son and daughter. They look out at the viewer from more than one of Lippi's masterpieces, as does he. This wonderful study connects us to their rich and complex lives, and the artistic treasures produced.

Fra Lippo Lippi
A brillant effort: beautiful reproductions with informative, well written, and sensative text. It is the best book on Fra Lippi I have seen. I wish however that the number of full page reproductions had been at least tripled and the text abridged. I was frustrated by page after page of postcard size reproductions surrounded by text. I purchase art books for the pictures not the words.

Mistakes
Giovanni di Francesco de CREVELLERIA was an architect of the Seventeenth Century. He erected Galileo's tomb in Santa Croce.

Lippi's assistant was not this Crevelleria but Giovanni di Francesco da ROVEZZANO ( J. Ruda) [1439 -1459]. A predella hangs in the Louvre, beside Lippi's Madonna . Da Rovezzano's masterpiece can be admired in the Casa Buonarroti, Firenze.

The Carmelite Saints in the cathedral of Santo Stefano, in Prato, were painted by Fra Diamante, not by Lippi (see Mannini: The Restoration of Lippi's Nativita, 1998).

Like Vasari, Milanesi's editions have been accepted as the norm for several decades (Vasari's for several centuries).