records of the artist's movements to make his presence at Padua in 1433-4 appear impossible. On the other hand, Vasari's story of Filippo's capture by pirates on the coast of the Marches of Ancona, his long-extended captivity and final liberation by his master whose favour he had gained by the excellence of art, and his visit to Naples on the home journey, belongs to the realm of fable.

In or before 1437, Fra Filippo was certainly back in Florence, since the Deliberazioni of the Company of Orsanmichele show that in that year he was commissioned to paint the great altarpiece of the "Madonna and Child, with Angels and two Abbots" for the Barbadori Chapel in Santo Spirito, which is now one of the treasures of the Louvre. It is this picture to which Domenico Veneziano refers in a letter to Piero de' Medici, dated Perugia, April 1, 1438, asking to be entrusted with the commission for an altarpiece, since "Fra Filippo and Fra Giovanni have much work to do, and especially Fra Filippo has a panel for Santo Spirito which, should he work day and night, will not be done in five years, so great is the work." Yet in the following year we find him writing a begging letter to the same Piero de' Medici.

There can be no doubt that the gay friar led the life of a true "Bohemian"—that he was fond of women and wine, and wasted his substance in the company of his boon companions. He spent his money as rapidly as he earned it, and was therefore in constant financial difficulties, which involved him in no end of litigation. His most prosperous years apparently began in 1442, when, probably through Cosimo's intervention, Pope Eugene IV. made him rector of the parish church of S. Quirico a Legnaja, of which post he was deprived by papal decree as a result of an action brought against him by his assistant, Giovanni da Rovezzano. Giovanni sued him for the amount of forty florins due to him for work done, and Fra Filippo did not shrink from producing a forged receipt. To this at least he confessed on the rack "when he saw his intestines protruding from his wounds." Whether much weight can be attached to a confession obtained by such means is another question, but there is nothing in the career of Fra Filippo to make such disgraceful conduct appear impossible.

An appeal to the Pope led to another investigation of the case. The judgment of the Curia was confirmed, the Pope referring on this occasion to Fra Filippo as a painter qui plurima et nefanda scelera perpetravit. Nevertheless, some years later, our artist is still mentioned as rettore e commendatario di San Quirico a Legnaja. From which it may be assumed that the judgment deprived him merely of his spiritual office, and left him in enjoyment of the revenue connected with the post.

The ups and downs of Filippo Lippi's career in the fifties of the fourteen-hundreds are more than a little confusing. Of commissions there was no lack. And certain emoluments must have come to him from his ecclesiastic appointments. His disgraceful conduct towards Giovanni da Rovezzano, and the notorious looseness of his morals—one need only recall the well-known anecdote of his escape through a window of the Medici Palace in search of amorous adventure—did not stand in the way of his being made chaplain to the nuns of S. Niccolò de' Fieri, in 1450,2 and of Santa Margherita in Prato, in 1456. He bought a little house at Prato in 1452, and another in 1454. During this whole period he had so much work on hand that he was unable to fulfil his contracts, which led to further unpleasant litigations. Yet in 1454, as we learn from Neri di Lorenzo di Bicci's diaries, he found it advisable to deposit some gold-leaf with the said Neri, in order to save it from seizure by his creditors. On July 20, 1457, he writes to Giovanni de' Medici to ask for an advance payment for work in hand—the same work, presumably, over the execution of which he was so tardy that Francesco Cantamanti had to visit his studio daily to urge its completion on behalf of his patron. In his report to Giovanni de' Medici, dated August 31, 1457, Cantamanti states that on the preceding day Fra Filippo's studio was seized by his landlord for arrears of rent.

Meanwhile the Carmelite's art had made prodigious progress. Filippo Lippi, the pupil of the last Giottesque, was now swimming abreast of the mighty current of the Renaissance. If his early Madonnas recall something of the spirituality and naïve faith of Fra Angelico, the altarpieces of his later Florentine period, and, above all, the superb "Coronation of the Virgin," painted for Sant' Ambrogio, and now in the Florence Academy, are inspired by the beauty of this visible world. The atmosphere is of this earth, and not of the celestial regions. His types are no longer ethereal, but realistically robust. In the "Coronation of the Virgin" he has left us a portrait of himself at the age of about forty, in the figure of the kneeling monk on the left, towards whom an angel raises a scroll with the