around 1457 -1504 · Florentine Renaissance, Botticelli and antique invention

Lively line, warm colors, precious details and fantastic antiques make Filippino Lippi the inventive link between Botticelli, Masaccio and the High Renaissance.

Filippino Lippi was born in Prato around 1457 from the relationship between the Carmelite painter Fra Filippo Lippi and Lucrezia Buti. After the death of his father in 1469, he entered the studio of Sandro Botticelli. He assimilated the elegant line, moving silhouettes and poetic sensitivity of his master, then quickly developed a more nervous and complex way. His first major challenge was to complete the frescoes of the Brancacci Chapel in Florence, begun several decades earlier by Masaccio and Masolino. Filippino adapted his style to dialogue with Masaccio's monumentality while introducing contemporary portraits, lively gestures and narrative details. Panel painter and an exceptional designer, he practiced metal point on prepared papers, then pen and wash with increasing freedom. His Virgins combine tenderness, landscape and symbolic objects; his secular stories condense several successive moments in the same architecture. Called to Rome in 1488, he decorated the Carafa chapel of Santa Maria sopra Minerva. The study of Roman antiquities then nourishes a fantastic vocabulary of grotesques, trophies, monsters and moving architecture. Back in Florence, he completed the Strozzi Chapel in Santa Maria Novella, where color, ancient decor and dramatic energy reached extraordinary complexity. Died in 1504, Filippino was more famous than Botticelli among certain contemporaries and influenced the sacra conversazione of the High Renaissance. The "Filippino Lippi" selection notably compares The Descent from the Cross and Scenes from the History of Virginia. His reading favors drawing.

Filippino inherits Botticelli's grace but sets it in motion: line, antiquity and detail become an ever freer invention.