Fra Filippo Lippi was a painter of Florence and a Carmelite friar. He was born in the city around 1406 and died at Spoleto in 1469.
He painted Madonnas who look like the young women of his own city. He is just as famous for a scandal: he carried a nun, Lucrezia Buti, out of her convent in Prato and lived with her.
Their son, Filippino Lippi, also became a painter, and the young Sandro Botticelli trained in Lippi's workshop.
The scandal raises a question people still ask in front of his pictures: is the face of his Virgin Lucrezia's?
Cool Stories About Art is a newsletter to learn art the fun way.
Join 200,000+ readers and get:
10 new art stories / month
The entire archive of content (140+ articles)
Comment, ask questions, and chat with other readers
Nothing in his beginnings pointed to such a life. Lippi was the son of a butcher and lost his parents young. The Carmelites, an order of friars who lived in community under religious vows, took the orphan into their monastery of Santa Maria del Carmine, on the south bank of the Arno.
The friars fed and taught him, and he stayed with them for years. He had little taste for study: as a novice, he covered his books with drawings. He kept the title Fra, the "brother" given to friars, for the rest of his life.
The monastery also gave him his trade. In its church, the young painter Masaccio was covering the walls of the Brancacci Chapel with frescoes. This chapel made Lippi a painter.
The chapel in his own monastery
What Lippi saw in that chapel was new: painted bodies with the weight of real ones.
What You'll Discover
Why a poor boy wore the habit.
Whose frescoes he grew up beside.
What happened at the procession.
Whose face is in the Madonnas.
Who kept rescuing him.
What nobody can prove about his death.