Filippo Lippi

A painter’s legend may be false and still reveal something true about his art. Paul G. Konody opens with a harder puzzle: why have generations of critics read sensuality into Fra Filippo Lippi’s Madonnas because of the friar’s scandalous life?

In Renaissance Florence, old stories about artists are giving way to documents from the archives of Florence and Prato. Writing in the early twentieth century, Konody follows Lippi from his beginnings as a butcher’s son to his work as a Carmelite painter, weighing the confirmed facts of his love affairs and financial troubles against the tender, luminous figures he painted. Was Lippi’s religious art worldly because its maker was—or did critics mistake a new delight in earthly beauty for a lack of spiritual feeling?

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