Fra Filippo Lippi: Life and Work, with a complete catalogue - Hardcover

Ruda, Jeffrey

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0714823627 ISBN 13: 9780714823621

Publisher: Phaidon Press, 1994

Synopsis

Jeffrey Ruda's work, first published in 1993, embodies the first ever full-scale and in-depth study of Fra Fillipo Lippi (c.1406-69) to be published for many years, and provides a fundamental reassessment of his intriguing life and momentous work. It furthermore attempts with sensitivity to define the nature of Lippi's unique prominence as a portrayer of the subtleties of human feeling, and to identify his achievement in the broader social and historical context of the world of art during the early Renaissance.

Ruda's landmark survey is an invaluable reference work, with full historical analysis, a complete catalogue raisonné, beautiful colour plates, and fascinating narrative text.

About this title

Review:

Fra Filippo Lippi (c.1406-1469) was not only one of the greatest innovators of early Italian Renaissance art; he was also, as Jeffrey Ruda points out inFra Filippo Lippi: Life and Work, a biographically fascinating figure. Enrolled as a friar into the Convent of Santa Maria del Carmine in Florence as a young boy, Lippi was exposed to Massaccio's frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel and was soon undertaking frescoes as early as 1432. He quickly received increasingly prestigious commissions for chapels, frescoes and paintings for the likes of the Barbadori family and Piero di Cosimo de'Medici. However, in 1455 Lippi found himself embroiled in a bitter legal dispute, accused of embezzling money from an assistant. This led, according to Lippi, to his subsequent torture and confession on the rack. Although he continued to receive increasingly prestigious commissions, in 1457 potential disaster again struck; the painter scandalously fathered an illegitimate son by an Augustinian nun in Prato, Lucrezia Buti, who he married in 1459, revoking his ecclesiastical vows in 1461.

Fra Filippo Lippi: Life and Work offers a concise abridged version of Ruda's standard account of the artists, first published in 1993, to which are added 177 magnificently reproduced colour plates which illustrate Lippi's complete oeuvre. Interweaving what is known of Lippi's life with detailed analyses of the techniques, composition and iconography of Lippi's work, Ruda argues convincingly that Lippi "did the most to individualise human figures and to explore the role of colour in spatial illusion" and that during the 1450s his intellectual "interests and sensibility helped to create a new pictorial theme, the Adoration of the Christ in the Wilderness", exemplified in Lippi's Adoration of the Infant Jesus designed for the chapel altarpiece in Cosimo de' Medici's Palazzo. Ruda's book is the standard work on Lippi and captures with great elegance and erudition the enigmatic spirit of one of the founding fathers of Renaissance painting: A lousy friar but a divine artist. --Jerry Brotton

Review:

"This scholarly book, with its many fine illustrations, restores Fra Filippo Lippi to a position of pre-eminence among his peers."―Art Review

About this edition

• Publisher: Phaidon Press
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0714823627
• ISBN 13: 9780714823621
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 560