1458
unspecified
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Pair of Panels from a Triptych: The Archangel Michael and St. Anthony Abbot is a 1458 unspecified by Filippo Lippi, a Early Renaissance work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
You see two saints standing side by side against a gold background. Michael holds a sword and scales, Anthony leans on a staff with a small bell. These panels were once part of a larger altarpiece, painted as a gift for a king. The artist used math to make the space look real—lines on the floor and shadows that seem to push the figures forward. The gold leaf wasn’t just decoration; it showed the saints were in a holy place. Look up *sfumato* to see how other artists softened edges like this.
These panels depicting Saints Anthony the Abbot and Michael originally flanked a central scene of the Madonna and Child with Angels, now lost, to form a triptych. Giovanni di Cosimo de’ Medici of Florence commissioned the ensemble in 1457 as a diplomatic gift to Alfonso V of Aragon. Fra Filippo Lippi, a Carmelite friar and one of the great masters of early Renaissance Florence, depicted realistic, weighty figures in a three-dimensional space using a system of linear perspective, inspired partly by Masaccio’s Brancacci Chapel, and reflected in the background architecture. Saint Anthony the…
Saint Michael's opulent appearance reflects the wealth and status of both the patron and the recipient of these paintings.
Read the full account in the museum source.
Filippo Lippi (c. 1406 – 8 October 1469), also known as Lippo Lippi, was an Italian Renaissance painter of the Quattrocento (fifteenth century) and a Carmelite priest. He was an early Renaissance master of a painting…
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