Madonna with the Child and Two Angels by Filippo Lippi

Madonna with the Child and Two Angels by Filippo Lippi, 1465

At the window

The Virgin sits in profile at the left, on a chair of which we see only the carved, scrolled arm and an embroidered cushion trimmed with pearls and tassels. Her hands are pressed together in prayer, and she looks down at her son with an expression the Uffizi calls gentle and indulgent, almost melancholy. She is dressed in dark blue-green with reddish cuffs, and her hair is dressed in the fashion of Florence in her day: drawn back from a high forehead, bound with a string of pearls, and wound through with a pale, ruffled veil that falls over her shoulders. Her halo is a single fine gold line.

The Child does not sit on her lap. Two angels hold him up to her. He is plump and curly-haired, loosely wrapped in a white cloth, and he stretches both arms toward his mother. One angel, mostly hidden, supports him from below; only his face and hands show. The other, in the foreground at the right, is a boy in a white shirt with a brown wing at his back, and he turns to look straight out of the picture with a broad grin. Art historians have long remarked on him: he seems less like an angel than a real child.

All of this happens in front of a window framed in grey pietra serena stone. Beyond it is a wide landscape of rocky pinnacles, fields, a walled town and the sea, under a pale sky. Setting a Madonna and Child before an open window onto a landscape was unusual in Florence at the time, and the landscape recalls Flemish painting. The seashore has been read as a probable reference to Mary's title Star of the Sea.

Date, model and history

The painting is tempera on wood, about 95 by 62 centimetres according to the Uffizi, which dates it about 1460–1465; other writers have allowed a range from 1450 to 1465. It is one of the few works by Filippo painted without help from his workshop. Its commission is not documented.

The Madonna has traditionally been identified with Lucrezia Buti, the nun with whom Filippo had two children. The Uffizi notes that nothing confirms it. Another suggestion is that the grinning angel was modelled on their son Filippino, born in 1457, which would support a date near 1465.

The earliest firm record of the painting puts it, in the late eighteenth century, in the Medici villa of Poggio Imperiale outside Florence; an inscription on the back of the panel attests to this. On 13 May 1796 it entered the grand-ducal collections that became the Uffizi, where it hangs today (inventory 1890 no. 1598). It became a model for later Florentine Madonnas, especially those of Sandro Botticelli.

The painter

Filippo Lippi (c. 1406–1469) was born in Florence and entered a Carmelite monastery as a boy, with his brother; hence the name Fra Filippo. Later, in Prato, he fell in love with Lucrezia Buti; their son Filippino Lippi also became a painter, and the two names are easily confused. This picture is the father's work, painted when Filippino was a small child. Filippo's chief patrons were the Medici. He died in Spoleto in 1469.

Sources: Uffizi Galleries, Filippo Lippi, Madonna and Child with Two Angels · Wikipedia, Madonna and Child (Lippi) · Wikimedia Commons, File:Fra Filippo Lippi - Madonna with the Child and two Angels - WGA13307.jpg