1458
unspecified
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Panel from a Triptych: The Archangel Michael is a 1458 unspecified by Filippo Lippi, a Early Renaissance work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
You see a tall, golden-haired angel in a red robe, holding a sword and stepping on a dark, twisted demon. This panel was once part of a three-part altar piece. The middle panel, showing Mary and baby Jesus, is now lost. The artist used straight lines and math to make the angel look solid, like he could step right out of the frame. To see how this trick of depth works, look up sfumato.
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 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 Abbot rejected…
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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