It Began Here

Filippo Lippi’s Madonna and Child

I first saw this work when I was 10, and it still simply speaks to me.

10 years old and in Florence, falling in love with this period in art history. Even trying to define the feeling now remains nigh impossible. It simply gives me joy.

Filippo Lippi’s Madonna and Child was painted around 1458, when he was a Carmelite priest. At the time he was working on the monastery chapel of St Margherita in Prado, where Lucrezia Buti was a Dominican novitiate. Looking at her in this painting, it’s little wonder he chose her as his model for several of his madonnas. Even less surprising is that the child in the painting is their son, Filippino Lippi, who himself became a famous painter.

Leonardo’s first known painting

The angel on the  left in this painting , plus the surrounding landscape, is the oldest known surviving work by Leonardo da Vinci. It was begun in 1470, when he was 18 years ago. (The other angel is perhaps by Botticelli; both were apprentices in Verrocchio’s studio). In his Lives of the Artists, Giorgio Vasari writes of how, when Verrocchio saw Leonardo’s work, he never touched paints again as his pupil had surpassed him. (This did indeed prove Verrocchio’s last painting, but the story is probably apocryphal, as Verrocchio’s fame lay in his sculpture, on which he continued to work.) Some art historians believe the angel is a self portrait of the young Leonardo.

Leonardo’s Annunciation

Much as I would love to be in Florence (really, who wouldn’t?) just looking at these works soothes my soul and helps me escape reality, if even for a little while.