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| Lippo di Benivieni |
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| Painter |
| Florence, mentioned in documents from 1296 to 1327 |
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Lippo di Benivieni was one of the most important artistic personalities
in Florentine painting during the first half of the 14th century.
Influenced by the latest grotesque trends, which he translated into a
completely original style of his own, all his work, even the earliest
attributed him, was characterised by unmistakable traces of the old
Gothic styles. A typical example is his Three Stories of the Passion of
Christ, dateable from around the last decade of the 13th century and
now split up among different museums.
Mentioned in documents from 1296,
his workshop became a member of the Guild of Doctors and Chemists for
the firsttime between 1312 and 1320. He worked on some extremely
important commissions, painting the doors for the tabernacle in the
Baptistery of San Giovanni in 1314 (today lost), while in 1316 he
appears to have been working for the Company of Laudists at Santa Maria
Novella, who nominated him captain the same year. He had a privileged
relationship moreover with the Benedictine convent of nuns of San Pier
Maggiore and, from 1300 to 1320 circa, carried out a series of works
for their church (demolished in 1785). These included the Cross for the
rood screen, carried out in around 1300 and today in the Museum of the
Opera of Santa Croce, and the Madonna and Child enthroned between St.
Peter and St. Lucy, from around 1318, now on display in the Horne
Museum in Florence.
Some of the works that he certainly carried out in
that period include the Tabernacle in Memphis (Brook Museum of Arts) of
1310-15, and the Lamentation over the dead Christ in the Civic Museum
of Pistoia. The artist reached the heights of his expressive talents in
the Lamentation, where he appears to have completely overcome the
almost metaphysical lyricism of the Gothic school, and, although he was
always to remain faithful to this style, he still managed to transform
it into a form of research into the deepest sentiments of the human
soul. After making a comparison with his painted work, critics now
recognise the hand of Lippo in some illuminated works like, for
example, the gradual in the Museum of Religious Art of Impruneta,
carried out more or less between 1315 and 1320.
The Triptych in the
Contini Bonacossi Donation (Uffizi Gallery, Florence) or the St. John
the Baptist enthroned in Oxford (Christ Church Picture Gallery), date
from his maturity in the 1320's, while the important fragment of the
Majesty in the Metropolitan Museum of New York, dating from around
1435, stands out among his later work.
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