Customer Reviews

Fra Filippo Lippi the Carmelite Painter

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Holmes' book looks like a sumptuous coffee table art book and is a splendid example of a well produced one. The contents, in addition to the excellent illustrations, add up to an exhaustive and definitive study of Lippi's life and work by setting him firmly in the detailed religious and social context of his time and place. All of the artistic influences on his life are thoroughly catalogued. The significance of Florence's Santa Maria del Carmine is well documented, since it was the site of Lippi'a artistic training as well as his religious formation, and the lasting Carmelite infuences on Lippi's great works are described in great detail. Many historical misconceptions are corrected: Lippi was no orphan; he apparantly never severed completely his membership in the Carmelite Order. There is so much detail in this marvelous book, I wanted more informatoin about what happened to Lucrezia Buti and her son and daughter. They look out at the viewer from more than one of Lippi's masterpieces, as does he. This wonderful study connects us to their rich and complex lives, and the artistic treasures produced.

A brillant effort: beautiful reproductions with informative, well written, and sensative text. It is the best book on Fra Lippi I have seen. I wish however that the number of full page reproductions had been at least tripled and the text abridged. I was frustrated by page after page of postcard size reproductions surrounded by text. I purchase art books for the pictures not the words.

Giovanni di Francesco de CREVELLERIA was an architect of the Seventeenth Century. He erected Galileo's tomb in Santa Croce.

Lippi's assistant was not this Crevelleria but Giovanni di Francesco da ROVEZZANO ( J. Ruda) [1439 -1459]. A predella hangs in the Louvre, beside Lippi's Madonna . Da Rovezzano's masterpiece can be admired in the Casa Buonarroti, Firenze.

The Carmelite Saints in the cathedral of Santo Stefano, in Prato, were painted by Fra Diamante, not by Lippi (see Mannini: The Restoration of Lippi's Nativita, 1998).

Like Vasari, Milanesi's editions have been accepted as the norm for several decades (Vasari's for several centuries).