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Museum of Sacred Art
Montespertoli
Two Madonna and Child by Filippo Lippi
mirroring and comparing
 This work comes from the Church of Sant’Andrea a Botinaccio, in the Commune of Montespertoli, and is dated from the early 1440’s. This panel deals with the well-known iconography of the Madonna with Child in a particular way. It confers on the painting a great compositional simplicity and a sense of everyday domestic life without diminishing the sacredness of the image. The sacred quality is achieved by an exceptionally transparent rendering of the halos and the intensity of the figures’ gaze. Mary is framed by a niche with a marked geometric structure. Her face, foreseeing the fate of her son, is pervaded by a sense of absorbed melancholy as she props her son’s head on a pillow of precious fabric. The Child is wrapped completely in swaddling clothes, according to the custom of the time.
 This panel, unanimously accepted as a major work by Filippo Lippi and dated to the mid or late 1460’s, comes from Palazzo Medici Riccardi in Firenze. The Madonna uses one hand to cradle the head of the Child so that their cheeks touch, a gesture that adds a note of great warmth and tenderness. The child stands on a parapet in front of a niche with a shell motif. The remarkably three-dimensional quality of the space shows how much Filippo learned from Masaccio, but with a taste for refinement and a special attention for decoration (Mary’s red dress, the tiny pearls hanging from the hem of her shawl, and the dot patterns in the halos) which were still unknown to the austere master.
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