It is not within the scope of this brief sketch of the life and art of Fra Filippo Lippi to enter into a detailed critical discussion of his extant works. I am not here concerned with questions of debatable attributions, or with the share that Fra Diamante and other assistants or pupils may have had in the execution of works that pass generally under his name. All that can here be attempted is, to gather from the cumulative evidence of the pictures that are unquestionably by the master's own hand, the real significance of his great achievement and the place he occupies in the evolution of Italian art. In the progress of his style from the early "Nativities" to the Prato frescoes is reflected the whole course of Early Renaissance art from Gothic awkwardness to full freedom. Of course, Fra Filippo lived in a period of transition and of passionate striving for expression; and to a certain extent every artist is the product of the spirit of his time. The tendencies which resulted in the full blossoming of Renaissance art were at work, and would, no doubt, have conquered in the end, even if Filippo Lippi had never existed. Nevertheless, he was one of the greatest initiators of the Renaissance in painting; and it is his peculiar merit that, at a period of artistic pupilage, when every painter's training was directed towards the close assimilation of his particular master's peculiarities, and when progress consisted largely in the grafting of some personal note or other on to the inherited tradition, Fra Filippo not only liberated himself from the narrow confines of his early training by his readiness to benefit from the example of any native or "foreign" master who had added some new word to the language of art, but he was also ever ready to learn direct from the greatest source of artistic inspiration—from Nature.

From his earliest beginnings, which rather suggest illuminated miniatures on a large scale, we see him grow step by step, acquire knowledge of perspective, of design, of colour harmonies, of the effect of light and atmosphere, of movement. We find him initiating advance in many directions. The circular composition, which was scarcely known before his days, is carried by him to such perfection, that it becomes the favourite device of most later Florentine painters. He is the first Florentine who shows a real appreciation of the beauty of Nature, who allows real daylight to enter into his pictures, and who studies reflections. The Florentine School was never a school of painters in the strict sense of the word, like the Venetian School. Its work was always based on linear design, upon which colour was superadded—an afterthought, as it were. The Florentine did not think in terms of colour. But Fra Filippo, without abandoning the essentially Florentine insistence on linear design, came nearer the true pictorial conception than any of his contemporaries or successors. In his first "Nativity" at the Florentine Academy he gives not the slightest hint of the astounding development his art was to undergo before he left Florence for Prato. The colour is purely localised, like the flat tones of the Gothic miniaturists in whose school he had been trained. The Madonna looks as if she were cut out and pasted on to the landscape. What a step from its hard delineation to the morbidezza, and the cool shimmering tones and all-pervading sense of atmosphere in his "Coronation of the Virgin," which, in this respect, remains a unique achievement in Florentine art. Both his Florentine "Nativities" are as awkward and clumsy in design as could be. Lopped-off figures of praying monks are squeezed into the extreme corners; the landscape background is seen in steep perspective, almost as in a bird's-eye view, and has no relation to the figures in the foreground; the perspective and the whole arrangement of the ruined building in the one are childish. And a few years later he had arrived at the noble architectonic design of the "Virgin Enthroned," at the Louvre, in which, notwithstanding here and there a reminiscence of Gothic awkwardness, the figure of the angel on the left foreshadows the easy grace of similarly poised figures in Andrea del Sarto's art.

Again and again Fra Filippo acts as initiator and sets the fashion for whole generations of artists. He is one of the first to experiment with devices for producing the illusion of depth, either by the interpolation, between the foreground and the background figures, of architectural elements, as in the Louvre "Madonna"—the idea had already served Donatello in the sister-art of sculpture—or by the skilful disposition and lighting of the subsidiary figures in the background, as in the episodes from the life of St. Anne, which form the setting to the adorable "Madonna and Child" of the Pitti tondo. If Michelangelo's nude athletes in the background of his "Holy Family" tondo are based upon the similar figures in Luca Signorelli's circular "Madonna and Child" at the Uffizi, Signorelli himself clearly derived from Filippo Lippi the use of the background figures, one of whom turns his back to the spectator just like the women on the extreme right of Lippi's tondo, for the purpose of enhancing the sense of depth and space. This woman with the boy clinging to the folds of her dress, as well as the one by whom she is preceded—a rapidly moving figure, with clinging diaphanous garments and with a basket poised on her head—will be found again and again during the next half-century of Florentine art, just as the Uffizi "Madonna adoring the Divine Child," who is supported by two boy-angels, became the prototype of a long succession of similar pictures. In the dancing "Salome" of the Prato frescoes, again, we have the forerunner of the type of figure and movement that received its highest development in the art of Botticelli, Filippo Lippi's greatest pupil.

Every phase of the triumphant progress of Renaissance art finds an echo in Filippo Lippi's painting. Masaccio helped him to shake off Gothic awkwardness and to achieve a certain degree of statuesque dignity. From Gentile da Fabriano he took the delight in gay, festive attire and sumptuous pageantry, which is clearly expressed in Sir Frederick Cook's tondo, and in a modified form in the Academy "Coronation." Pier dei Franceschi's great conquest of the realm of light and air did no more fail to leave its mark upon the Carmelite's art, than did Paolo Uccello's discoveries in the science of perspective. The classic thrones of his Madonnas and the architectural backgrounds of some of his pictures proclaim his enthusiasm for the forms and decorative details of the Renaissance churches and palaces that were then rising, under the influence of the new learning, in every part of Florence. Nor is it possible to over-estimate the prodigious effect produced upon the artist-monk's receptive mind by his study of the works of Donatello. The Uffizi "Madonna" is in reality a relief by Donatello or one of his followers translated into paint. Take any photographic reproduction of that picture, and examine the head of the roguishly smiling angel, the arms of the Infant Saviour and of the Madonna, and the way the whole group is set against the window-frame. The illusion is extraordinary. If it were not for the landscape seen through the opening in the background and the transparent folds of the veil over the Virgin's head, it would be pardonable to mistake the picture thus reduced to black and white for a bas-relief of the Donatello School.

Thus, with the shrewd intelligence of which his features in the auto-portrait introduced into the "Coronation" are so eloquent, Fra Filippo knew how to take hints and suggestions from the art of all his great contemporaries. But he applied the same keen intelligence to the study of the living world around him. The knowledge imparted to him by other masters was thus allowed to filter through his personal observation of Nature. And whilst it is possible to trace in his work the most varied artistic influences, his own personality was never eclipsed or obscured. Always ready to learn and to assimilate new principles, he never stooped to the imitation of mere mannerisms. From any such inclination he was saved by his temperament, his human sympathy, his artistic curiosity. Only to his earliest Madonnas cling reminiscences of Giottesque types and formulas. Even before he had reached full maturity, the typical had become ousted by the individual. And in this respect he was again an initiator in Florentine art. He was one of the first painters of his school who makes us feel that almost every character in his pictures is the result of personal observation—is practically a portrait. He is the first true genre painter of his school. Benozzo Gozzoli, it is true, went far beyond him as a pictorial raconteur of Florentine fifteenth-century life; but the origin of Benozzo's genre-like treatment of scriptural incidents, which makes his frescoes at Pisa and San Gimignano such precious documents, is to be found in Fra Filippo Lippi.

The Prato frescoes introduce several delicious incidents of this nature, like the leave-taking of St. John from his parents, or the child-birth scene in the episode in the life of St. Stephen. But they are not absent either from his altarpieces. The exquisitely recorded happenings in the house of St. Anne, which form the background of the Pitti "Madonna and Child," are pure genre-painting, and are, moreover, a daring departure from all the earlier conventions which ruled the rendering of this favourite subject. The earlier "Coronation of the Virgin" shows something of the same tendency in the charming group of a female saint and two children in front of the kneeling monk. The saint, like the Virgin Mary herself, is just an elegantly attired Florentine lady of the period. The very angels surrounding the throne of the Heavenly Father are humanised, as it were, by being divested of their wings. Even in the stately and formal "Virgin Enthroned," at the Louvre, Fra Filippo could not resist the temptation to introduce a roguish urchin on each side peeping over the balustrade, and thus transferring the scene from the heavenly region to this earth.

Fra Filippo loved the world in which he found so much beauty. For all that, his art reveals neither sensuality nor worldliness. He was indeed, as Mr. Berenson so happily describes him, a genre-painter, whose genre was that of the soul, as that of others was of the body. But he expressed the soul through the body. As M. AndrÉ Maurel has it: "Before painting faces, he looked at them, which was a new thing.... He was a great painter, because he was a man."

The plates are printed by Bemrose & Sons, Ltd., Derby and London
The text at the Ballantyne Press, Edinburgh