the possibility of dispute, even though they have been embroidered upon by imaginative pens—and has dealt with his art in the light of that knowledge, reading into his paintings not only his artistic emotions, but his personal desires and passions. Only thus can it be explained that generation after generation of writers on art have misconstrued the exquisite and touching innocence and virgin purity of his Madonna type into an expression of sensuality. Again and again we read about the pronounced worldliness of Fra Filippo's religious paintings, about their lack of spiritual significance and devout feeling.

Vasari, of course, is the fountain-head of this misconception of the Carmelite's art. According to the Aretine biographer, "it was said that Fra Filippo was much addicted to the pleasures of sense, insomuch that he would give all he possessed to secure the gratification of whatever inclination might at the moment be predominant, but if he could by no means accomplish his wishes, he would then depict the object which had attracted his attention in his paintings, and endeavour by discoursing and reasoning with himself to diminish the violence of his inclination. It was known that, while occupied in the pursuit of his pleasures, the works undertaken by him received little or none of his attention."

It so happens that many of the discreditable incidents of the friar's life, recorded by Vasari, have been confirmed by documentary evidence. There is not a shadow of doubt that Fra Filippo did abduct the nun Lucrezia Buti from her convent; that Filippino Lippi was the offspring of this illicit union; and that the Frate subsequently did not avail himself of the special papal dispensation to wed the nun. There is also abundant proof to show that Fra Filippo, in spite of the high esteem in which he was held as an artist, and which caused him to be entrusted with many a remunerative commission, was for ever in financial straits, was involved in many vexatious law cases, attempted to cheat his own assistants, and had no hesitation to break faith with his patrons. But all this does not affect his art. To read sensuality into his types of womanhood can only be the result of prejudice, of approaching his pictures in the light of the knowledge gathered from the pages of the chroniclers. Worldly he is compared with the pure, exalted spirituality of the Dominican Fra Angelico, but only in so far as he belonged already to the new era which had discovered, and revelled in, the visible beauty of this world of ours, whilst Fra Angelico, his contemporary, still belongs to the earlier age that looked to the empyrean for all true happiness. The art of both masters is planted in Gothic soil, though it bore different fruit, that of Fra Angelico being still essentially Gothic, though often tinged with a Renaissance flavour, whilst that of Fra Filippo has all the richness and fullness of the Renaissance, of which he was one of the great initiators.

That such conceptions as the Virgin in National Gallery "Annunciation," or the lovely Madonna in the tondo at the Palazzo Pitti, and many other authentic works by the master, are lacking in spirituality of expression, cannot be seriously maintained by anybody who approaches these pictures with an open mind and judges the artist by his achievement, not by his manner of life. Even Mr. Berenson, the most authoritative modern critic of Italian art, denies Fra Filippo a "profound sense of either material or spiritual significance—the essential qualifications of the real artist," although he admits in the same essay1 that "his real place is with the genre painters, only his genre was that of the soul, as that of others—of Benozzo Gozzoli, for example—was of the body." Browning, with the true poet's intuition, states the case of Fra Filippo more clearly than the vast majority of professional critics from Vasari to the present day, when he makes the friar exclaim:

II

Whereas all questions concerning Fra Filippo's artistic education remain largely a matter of conjecture and deduction, there is no lack of documentary material for a fairly accurate reconstruction of his life. Vasari remains, of course, the basis for any such attempt; but the archives of Florence and Prato have yielded a rich harvest of contemporary records, on the strength of which it is possible to clear up the contradictions and to correct the numerous errors that have crept into Vasari's life of The Florentine Painter, Fra Filippo Lippi.

Filippo was the son of Tommaso di Lippo, a butcher in a poor quarter of Florence, and of Mona Antonia di Bindo Sernigi. None of the various dates given in his wonted loose fashion by Vasari for the birth of the artist, accords with ascertainable facts, which point to the years 1406 to 1409, with probability favouring the earlier date. According to a document in the Archivio di Stato in Florence, confirmed by an entry in the account books of the convent of the Carmine, in which "Philippus Tomasi" is stated to have received his garments at the expense of that establishment, Filippo took the habit in the year 1421. There are no reasons to doubt Milanesi's well-reasoned suggestion that the artist was fifteen years of age when he took the vow—which would place the year of his birth about 1406.

"By the death of his father," continues Vasari, "he was left a friendless orphan at the age of two years, his mother having also died shortly after his birth. The child was for some time under the care of a certain Mona Lapaccia, his aunt, the sister of his father, who brought him up with great