Filippino Lippi's Madonna and Child
Filippino Lippi (Italian, Florentine, probably b. 1457–d. 1504). Madonna and Child, ca. 1485. Tempera, oil, and gold on wood; 32 x 23 1/2 in. (81.3 x 59.7 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Jules Bache Collection, 1949 (49.7.10).
«In 1949 the Metropolitan Museum was bequeathed a masterpiece of Italian Renaissance painting. Painted around 1485 by the Florentine master Filippino Lippi, it shows the Madonna and Child seated in a domestic interior, with a view through a window onto a landscape with a river.» It was commissioned by one of the wealthiest men in Florence, Filippo Strozzi, who had returned from his political exile with the intention of reasserting his family's prestige through the commissioning of great works of art. He built the largest and most magnificent palace in the city, had a chapel decorated with frescoes by Filippino Lippi, and commissioned a marble bust of himself by the sculptor Benedetto da Maiano. No expense was spared. In the case of the Madonna and Child, a work probably intended to decorate his villa, he must have instructed the artist to use the most expensive ultramarine blue available. The artist certainly produced a work of stunning richness and wonderful invention: the detailed still life and landscape view reflect his awareness of painting from north of the Alps. And he included a number of details that personalized it. The Strozzi crescents decorate the architecture and on the bridge in the background are two Africans fishing. Like other wealthy Florentines, Strozzi owned at least one African slave, whom he freed in his will.
Odd as it may seem to us today, many collectors in the nineteenth and early twentieth century did not like bright colors in their old master paintings, and visitors to the Metropolitan over the decades might be forgiven for having found Filippino's now ravishing painting rather tame and even a bit dull. You see, an intentionally tinted varnish had been applied to tone down its color and give it a somber gravitas. No one guessed what was hiding beneath that gloomy veneer until a test cleaning was performed this last fall. The result is a transformed work of art: a picture that miraculously combines richness of color with emotional tenderness; refined beauty with naturalistic observation.
Images of the painting before (left) and after (right) it was cleaned.
The picture is on view together with other objects in the Museum's collection that can be associated with the Strozzi family.
Keith Christiansen is chairman of the Department of European Paintings.
Related Links
Exhibition: A Renaissance Masterpiece Revealed: Filippino Lippi's Madonna and Child
Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History: Filippino Lippi (1456/47–1504); Biblical Figures: Madonna and Child
Department of European Paintings
Keith Christiansen
Keith Christiansen, John Pope-Hennessy Chairman of the Department of European Paintings, began work at the Met in 1977, and during that time he has organized numerous exhibitions ranging in subject from painting in fifteenth-century Siena, Andrea Mantegna, and the Renaissance portrait, to Giambattista Tiepolo, El Greco, Caravaggio, Ribera, and Nicolas Poussin. He has written widely on Italian painting and is the recipient of several awards. Keith has also taught at Columbia University and New York University's Institute of Fine Art. Raised in Seattle, Washington, and Concord, California, he attended the University of California campuses at Santa Cruz and Los Angeles, and received his PhD from Harvard University.