Filippo Lippi

Filippo Lippi (c. 1406–1469) was a Florentine painter and Carmelite friar, one of the leading painters of the early Renaissance in Florence. Orphaned young and raised in the Carmelite convent of the Carmine, he watched Masaccio fresco the Brancacci Chapel there and took from him a new sense of weight and space. He softened it with a gift for graceful figures, clear colour and tender, individual faces, and his Madonnas became among the most admired of the century. His life was famously unruly for a friar: he eloped with a nun, Lucrezia Buti, and their son Filippino became a major painter in his own right. Lippi trained Sandro Botticelli. He died at Spoleto while painting the apse of the cathedral.