Page:The painters of Florence from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century (1915).djvu/177

1469] Masaccio at work, and where he so far excelled his comrades that people said Masaccio's spirit had entered into the body of Fra Lippo. On the 8th of June 1421, the young artist took the vows of a Carmelite friar and became a member of the Order, but he still worked diligently at his profession, and painted many frescoes in the church and cloister, which were destroyed in the fire of 1771. We find the word "painter" affixed to Fra Lippo's name in the convent records of 1430 and 1431, at the end of which year he left the monastery to devote himself solely to art. By this time the Carmelites were probably satisfied that he had no vocation for the cloister, and did not seek to detain him, but he remained on friendly terms with them, and always signed his pictures "Frater Philippus."

Soon after this, according to a well-known story—which is not only told by Vasari, but was current in Florence towards the close of the century, and is placed by the novelist Matteo Bandello in Leonardo's lips—Fra Lippo fell into the hands of Moorish pirates, when he was sailing in a pleasure-boat off the coast of Ancona, and was taken captive to Barbary, and there sold as a slave. Here the skill with which he drew his master's portrait in charcoal on his prison-wall produced so favourable an impression on the Moors, that at the end of eighteen months he was released and returned to Florence. Whatever may be the truth of this strange story, it is certain that we hear nothing of Fra Lippo between 1431, and the summer of 1434, when he was employed in painting a tabernacle for the basilica of Il Santo, at Padua.

On his return to Florence he found a generous