Page:The painters of Florence from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century (1915).djvu/182

148 ling of the heads and hands, and graceful women-figures and architectural accessories are introduced in the background with a highly decorative effect. The original drawing for this sweet, mournful Virgin-face is in the Dreyfus collection in Paris, and is said to be a portrait of the fair novice Lucrezia Buti who afterwards became Fra Lippo's wife. The picture evidently belongs to the friar's maturer years, and was probably painted when he was at Prato. To an earlier date we must ascribe the Madonna and Angels in the Louvre, which was ordered by the Captain of Or' San Michele for a chapel in S. Spirito, in 1336, and which Lippi complained would cost him five years of incessant toil!

The large Coronation of the Virgin, in the Accademia, was ordered in 1441, by the Prior of S. Ambrogio, but only completed six years later, when the painter received the sum of 1200 lire. Here the painter's conception of the scene is strikingly original. Three rows of angels crowned with roses, and holding tall white lilies, stand around the throne; saints and bishops, monks and nuns mingle with little children in the crowd of worshippers below; and in the right hand, conspicuous among these splendid robes and wealth of ornament by his shaven head and Carmelite habit, is Fra Lippo himself, clasping his hands devoutly, while a laughing Angel holds up a scroll with the words Iste perfecit opus. In the same year that he finished this important work, he received another forty florins from the Signory of Florence for the small Vision of St. Bernard, in the National Gallery, which originally hung in a hall of the Palazzo Pubblico. But in spite of increasing fame