1458
unspecified
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Panel from a Triptych: St. Anthony Abbot is a 1458 unspecified by Filippo Lippi, a Early Renaissance work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
You see a thin wooden panel showing a bearded monk in a black robe, holding a tall staff and a small pig at his feet. This is one side of a three-part altar painting that’s now missing its center. The monk is Saint Anthony, who lived in the desert and was tempted by demons. Look how the folds of his robe cast real shadows—Lippi used a trick called linear perspective to make the figure look solid, not flat. To see how this trick works in other paintings, look up *chiaroscuro*.
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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