Part 2

There can be no doubt that the gay friar led the life of a true "Bohemian"--that he was fond of women and wine, and wasted his substance in the company of his boon companions. He spent his money as rapidly as he earned it, and was therefore in constant financial difficulties, which involved him in no end of litigation. His most prosperous years apparently began in 1442, when, probably through Cosimo's intervention, Pope Eugene IV. made him rector of the parish church of S. Quirico a Legnaja, of which post he was deprived by papal decree as a result of an action brought against him by his assistant, Giovanni da Rovezzano. Giovanni sued him for the amount of forty florins due to him for work done, and Fra Filippo did not shrink from producing a forged receipt. To this at least he confessed on the rack "when he saw his intestines protruding from his wounds." Whether much weight can be attached to a confession obtained by such means is another question, but there is nothing in the career of Fra Filippo to make such disgraceful conduct appear impossible.

An appeal to the Pope led to another investigation of the case. The judgment of the Curia was confirmed, the Pope referring on this occasion to Fra Filippo as a painter _qui plurima et nefanda scelera perpetravit_. Nevertheless, some years later, our artist is still mentioned as _rettore e commendatario di San Quirico a Legnaja_. From which it may be assumed that the judgment deprived him merely of his spiritual office, and left him in enjoyment of the revenue connected with the post.

The ups and downs of Filippo Lippi's career in the fifties of the fourteen-hundreds are more than a little confusing. Of commissions there was no lack. And certain emoluments must have come to him from his ecclesiastic appointments. His disgraceful conduct towards Giovanni da Rovezzano, and the notorious looseness of his morals--one need only recall the well-known anecdote of his escape through a window of the Medici Palace in search of amorous adventure--did not stand in the way of his being made chaplain to the nuns of S. Niccolò de' Fieri, in 1450,[2] and of Santa Margherita in Prato, in 1456. He bought a little house at Prato in 1452, and another in 1454. During this whole period he had so much work on hand that he was unable to fulfil his contracts, which led to further unpleasant litigations. Yet in 1454, as we learn from Neri di Lorenzo di Bicci's diaries, he found it advisable to deposit some gold-leaf with the said Neri, in order to save it from seizure by his creditors. On July 20, 1457, he writes to Giovanni de' Medici to ask for an advance payment for work in hand--the same work, presumably, over the execution of which he was so tardy that Francesco Cantamanti had to visit his studio daily to urge its completion on behalf of his patron. In his report to Giovanni de' Medici, dated August 31, 1457, Cantamanti states that on the preceding day Fra Filippo's studio was seized by his landlord for arrears of rent.

Meanwhile the Carmelite's art had made prodigious progress. Filippo Lippi, the pupil of the last Giottesque, was now swimming abreast of the mighty current of the Renaissance. If his early Madonnas recall something of the spirituality and naïve faith of Fra Angelico, the altarpieces of his later Florentine period, and, above all, the superb "Coronation of the Virgin," painted for Sant' Ambrogio, and now in the Florence Academy, are inspired by the beauty of this visible world. The atmosphere is of this earth, and not of the celestial regions. His types are no longer ethereal, but realistically robust. In the "Coronation of the Virgin" he has left us a portrait of himself at the age of about forty, in the figure of the kneeling monk on the left, towards whom an angel raises a scroll with the lettering IS PERFECIT OPUS. The features are rather coarse and heavy, but scarcely express that low sensuality which his biographers have tried to read into them. The expression of his eyes in particular is intelligent, frank, and good-natured.

III

The Sant' Ambrogio altarpiece must have added enormously to the reputation which the Carmelite painter enjoyed among his contemporaries. It was only natural that he should have been chosen by the _proposto_ Gemignano Inghirami and by the magistrates of Prato to undertake the fresco decoration in the choir of the cathedral of that city, when Fra Angelico, in spite of repeated urging, refused to accept this important commission, his time being fully occupied by the completion of the series of frescoes at the Vatican. In the spring of 1452, Fra Filippo, accompanied by his assistant, Fra Diamante, took up his abode at Prato, and entered upon the most eventful and artistically the most significant period of his career. As we have seen, he still kept up his workshop in Florence, where his temporary presence is repeatedly testified by documentary evidence during the next few years. Thus, although he began to work in the choir chapel immediately after his arrival at Prato, as may be seen from the entry in the _Libra delle spese_ in the _Archivio del Patrimonio ecclesiastico_ in Prato, recording under date of May 29, 1452, the payment of fifty lire to "Fra Diamante di Feo da Terranuova, gharzone di Fra Filippo di Tommaso," his frequent absence and general dilatoriness were the cause of so much delay that the decoration of the chapel was not completed before 1468, a year before the master's death.

During this period of sixteen years Fra Filippo continued to be employed by the members of the Medici family, by the _proposto_ Gemignano Inghirami, and by many other patrons in Prato and Pistoja. In addition to his frequent absence in Florence, he no doubt undertook several other journeys, of one of which at least we have certain knowledge: his sojourn in 1461 at Perugia, whither he was called to value Bonfigli's frescoes in the Palazzo del Comune--an honourable task which devolved upon him as the sole survivor of the three artists chosen for it by the Signory of Perugia, the other two being Fra Angelico, who died in 1455, and Domenico Veneziano, whose death occurred in the spring of the very year that witnessed the completion of Bonfigli's frescoes.

But quite apart from such interruptions in the execution of that superb series of frescoes at Prato, depicting scenes from the lives of St. John the Baptist and St. Stephen, as were due to professional causes, there was enough excitement and disturbance in the artist's private life to account at least in part for his tardiness in completing the work which constitutes his greatest claim to immortal fame. For Prato was the scene of the great romance of Fra Filippo's life, by which his name has become familiar even to those who know little of, and care less about, his artistic achievement. The abduction of the nun, Lucrezia Buti, by the amorous monk, who was then entering upon the sixth decade of his life, is on the whole correctly recorded by Vasari, and has formed the subject of many a literary romance and pictorial rendering. Subsequent doubts thrown upon it by such eminent critics as, among others, Messrs. Crowe and Cavalcaselle, who maintain that the story rests upon the sole testimony of Vasari, and that "contingent circumstances tend to create considerable doubts of Vasari's truth," almost succeeded in relegating the amorous friar's daring exploit into the realm of fiction, until Milanesi's researches established the substantial truth of the romantic story. The facts, briefly stated, are as follows:

On the death of the Florentine silk merchant, Francesco Buti, in 1450, his son, Antonio, found himself charged with the responsibility of a not too profitable business, and a large family of twelve brothers and sisters. The eldest of these sisters, Margherita, was married off to Antonio Doffi in 1451, and in the same year two other sisters, Spinetta, born 1434, and Lucrezia, born 1435, were placed with the nuns of Sta. Margherita at Prato, Antonio paying the required fee of fifty florins for each of them. Needless to say, the two girls thus committed to a living tomb at the very time when life beckoned to them with all its joys and seductions, were not consulted in this matter any more than was Fra Filippo when, as a mere child, he had to enter the establishment of the Carmelites in Florence. Presumably the two lively, handsome girls had no more vocation for the cloistral life than the pleasure-loving friar--which circumstance may be pleaded in mitigation of the scandalous offence of which they subsequently became guilty.

Whether Fra Filippo had become acquainted with the Buti maidens before they entered the nunnery of Sta. Margherita, which was then in charge of the Abbess Bartolommea de' Bovacchiesi, it is impossible to say. Certain it is, on the other hand, that the Madonna of the Pitti _tondo_, painted in 1452, already bears the features of the model who, in other pictures, has been identified as Lucrezia Buti. From this it may be assumed that Fra Filippo, who came to Prato only a year after the two sisters, and who lived there in a house opposite the convent of Sta. Margherita, must have known Lucrezia at least four years before she sat to him for the "Madonna della Cintola" in 1456, the year of her abduction. It is quite possible that the love-struck monk used the influence of his powerful protectors to secure his appointment as chaplain of Sta. Margherita, so as to facilitate intercourse with the object of his affection and desire. Nor did his by no means untainted reputation and the papal stigma (_qui plurima et nefanda scelera perpetravit_) stand in the way of the coveted post being actually conferred upon him in the year 1456.

In the same year, as soon as he had entered upon his new duties, the Abbess of Sta. Margherita commissioned the new chaplain to paint an altarpiece for the high altar of the convent church. This afforded Fra Filippo a welcome opportunity for carrying out what must have been a carefully and cunningly devised scheme. He begged the Abbess to allow Lucrezia Buti, "who was exceedingly beautiful and graceful," to sit for the head of the Madonna; and, having obtained this favour, presumably did not fail to advance his cause. His clerical habit and the great difference of age between the monk and the nun--he was then about fifty, and Lucrezia twenty-one--may have helped to disarm suspicion: they did not prevent the young nun from taking the fatal step which was bound to bring disgrace and dishonour upon her; which, indeed, was accounted a crime, for Lucrezia was not, as Vasari has it, "either a novice or a boarder," but one of the eight "choral and professed nuns" who formed the establishment of Santa Margherita.

The plot came to a successful issue on the 1st of May 1456, during the celebration of the feast of the Madonna della Cintola--Our Lady of the Girdle. On that day it was the custom to exhibit at the Cathedral a sacred relic, purporting to be the miraculous girdle given to St. Thomas by the Virgin, who appeared to him after her death. That day was one of the rare occasions when the nuns of Sta. Margherita left the precincts of their convent to join the worshippers in the Duomo. On May 1, 1456, there were eight nuns who set out to pray before the sacred girdle--but seven only returned to the convent. Lucrezia Buti had been carried off by her monkish lover to his house; and if any attempts were made to induce her to return, either to Sta. Margherita, or to her relatives in Florence, she lent a deaf ear to these appeals. Vasari relates that "the father of Lucrezia was so grievously afflicted thereat, that he never more recovered his cheerfulness, and made every possible effort to regain his child." This, of course, is pure invention, since Francesco Buti had been mouldering in his grave for six years when the abduction took place.

And now we come to the most amazing chapter of this fifteenth-century romance. Fra Filippo Lippi, the monk who had broken his vow and was openly living at Prato with the equally guilty nun, actually continued to administer to the spiritual welfare of the nuns of the convent that had been so irretrievably disgraced by his conduct! That his misdeed was allowed to pass unpunished and uncensured, may have encouraged others to follow his and Lucrezia's example. Whether or not the Carmelite was instrumental in helping the other nuns to escape, the fact remains that before long Spinetta Buti had joined her sister in Filippo's house, whilst three other nuns deserted the convent to live in illicit union with their lovers. The unfortunate Abbess, Bartolommea de' Bovacchiesi, whose portrait is to be seen as kneeling donor in the so-called "Madonna della Cintola," now in the Municipal Palace at Prato, died of shame and grief before the year came to a close.

The remote resemblance of the figure of St. Margaret, on the extreme left of that picture, to Lucrezia Buti as she appears in authentic works by the master, in addition to the fact that the "Madonna della Cintola" was originally in the church of Sta. Margherita, has given colour to the theory that this is the very altarpiece which figures so prominently in the chief romance of Filippo Lippi's life. The same claim has been advanced for the "Nativity" (No. 1343) at the Louvre. Much as one would like to identify either the one or the other with the picture referred to by the chroniclers, if only for the sentimental interest that would be attached to it, neither of the two can be accepted as authentic works by our artist. The best recent expert opinion has ascribed the Paris panel in turn to Fra Diamante, Pesellino, Stefano da Zevio, and Baldovinetti, agreeing only on the one point, that it cannot be by Fra Filippo. As regards the "Madonna della Cintola," critical analysis of the picture can only lead to the conviction that from beginning to end it is inferior bottega work, with never a trace of the master's own brush, although it may well be based on a design by Fra Filippo. It is true, the time that elapsed between the placing of the commission for the Sta. Margherita altarpiece and the abduction of Lucrezia was so short, that the picture may have been only just begun and left to be finished by some other inferior painter. On the other hand, there is no reason for this assumption, since Filippo Lippo continued to be connected with the convent in his capacity of chaplain.

In the year following that memorable feast of the Sacred Girdle, Lucrezia presented the friar with a son, who was to become known to fame as Filippino Lippi. The house in which he was born bears a commemorative inscription put up by the citizens of Prato in 1869:

FILIPPO LIPPI COMPRÒ E ABITÒ QUESTA CASA QUANDO COLORIVA GLI STUPENDI AFFRESCHI DEL DUOMO E QUÌ NACQUE NEL MCCCCLIX FILIPPINO PRECURSORE DI RAFFAELLO

"Filippo Lippi bought and inhabited this house when he painted the stupendous frescoes of the Cathedral, and here was born in 1459 (it should read 1457) Filippino, the precursor of Raphael."

If proof were needed that the escape of the other nuns was closely connected with the abduction of Lucrezia, it may be found in the fact that, when Lucrezia, for some unknown reason, found it advisable to feign repentance and to return to the convent of Sta. Margherita at the end of 1458, all the other fugitives followed her example. They had to submit to the formality of twelve months' probation before they took the veil again, in a solemn ceremony, in December 1459. Perhaps the reason for Lucrezia's return is not altogether dissociated from the financial troubles that beset her lover, as we have seen, about the time of Filippino's birth. The sincerity of her renewed vow of chastity is to be gathered not only from the fact that in 1465 she presented Fra Filippo with another child--a daughter, who was given the name Alessandra--but in the clear indictment set forth by an anonymous accuser in a _tamburazione_ under date of May 8, 1461. In this _tamburazione_, or secret accusation, addressed to the "officers of the night and monasteries of the city of Florence," a pretty state of affairs is revealed at the convent of Sta. Margherita, which "has been frequented and continues to be frequented by Ser Piero d'Antonio di Ser Vannozzo," who has "begot a male child in the said convent.... And if you wish to find him, you will find him every day in the convent, together with another man called frate Filippo. The latter excuses himself by saying that he is the chaplain, whilst the former says he is the procurator. And the said frate Filippo has had a male child by one called Spinetta. And he has in his house the said child, who is grown up and is called Filippino."

The anonymous accuser, of course, was mistaken in mentioning Spinetta, instead of her sister, as the mother of Filippino, who in his will expressly refers to "domine Lucretie ejus delicte matris et filie olim Francisci de Butis de Florentia," and thus removes every possible doubt as to his parentage. The mistake finds an easy explanation in the fact that both the sisters were for some time under Fra Filippo's roof.

What was the end of Lippi's romance? There are no contemporary records to throw clear light upon it. In Milanesi's edition of Vasari it is stated that Pope Eugene granted the monk a special dispensation to marry Lucrezia. If any such dispensation ever was granted, it must have been by Pius II., and not by Eugene. Under any circumstances, it seems very improbable that Fra Filippo, as we learn from the same source, should have refused to avail himself of this permission to legalise his union, because "he preferred to continue living the sort of life that pleased him." He was then a man of considerable age, near the end of his life, and past the times for "sowing his wild oats." The papal dispensation, if actually given, must have been sought for, in which case Filippo would presumably have availed himself of it; or, if granted on the Pope's own initiative, could not have been lightly set aside by a humble member of the Church, who was largely dependent on the emoluments accruing from his clerical appointments. The mere fact that Lucrezia's features are to be recognised in the friar's latest works, the frescoes in the Cathedral of Spoleto, tends to prove that the old man's affection was not transferred to different quarters; and Vasari's suggestion that his death was due to the libertinism of his conduct, which led to his being poisoned by certain relatives of a woman with whom he had become entangled, may be dismissed as a fable.

Vasari is at fault again in ascribing the commission for the decoration of the chapel in the Church of Our Lady at Spoleto, Fra Filippo's last important work, to the influence of Cosimo de' Medici. Fra Filippo went to Spoleto in 1467, and Cosimo had been buried in 1464. If any member of the Medici family had acted as mediator, it must have been Piero, who had always been a patron and protector of our artist. Of the four frescoes at Spoleto illustrating the Life of the Virgin, only the "Coronation" and the "Annunciation" are, so far as one can judge in their much restored condition, from the master's own hand. "The Death of the Virgin" and the "Nativity," though undoubtedly designed by him, are vastly inferior in execution, and are almost entirely the work of his assistant, Fra Diamante, who accompanied him to Spoleto, and stayed there several months after his master's death to complete the unfinished work.

Fra Filippo died on the 9th of October 1469, and left his son Filippino under the guardianship of Fra Diamante. He was buried in the church which had witnessed his last labours. The esteem in which he was held by those who knew how to appreciate his art--and among them, surely, the Medici must be placed at the top--found expression in the rivalry between Florence and Spoleto over his remains. When Lorenzo the Magnificent, some years after the great Carmelite's death, passed through Spoleto as ambassador of the Florentine Commonwealth, he demanded Fra Filippo's body from the Spoletans, for re-interment in the Duomo of Florence. The Spoletans' reply is characteristic of the spirit of the age: they begged to be left in possession of the remains of the master, since they were so poorly provided with distinguished men, whereas Florence had enough and to spare. Lorenzo must have been touched by a request presented in such flattering terms, for he not only allowed Filippo Lippi's body to remain in its original resting-place, but he commissioned from Filippino Lippi, the inheritor of the monk's artistic genius, a marble tomb, on which can be seen to this day the jovial features of the master thus honoured, the arms of Lorenzo and of the Lippi, and the commemorative inscription composed by the great humanist, Angelo Poliziano.