Filippino Lippi

Filippino Lippi received his first artistic training from his father, Fra Filippo Lippi (see 1976.16). Following his father’s death, Filippino entered the workshop of Botticelli by 1472. Although known primarily as a painter, he was an active draftsman from the very start of his career, and the nearly 150 drawings by him that survive are perhaps more than exist for any fifteenth-century artist other than Leonardo da Vinci.¹ Like most Florentine artists of his time, he used pen and ink for his quick sketches (for example, see IV, 3) but turned to metalpoint on prepared paper for his more carefully observed figure studies. Particularly in the latter media, in examples like the present sheet, he comes particularly close to Botticelli in his technique and style.

Like many other Florentine drawings from the later decades of the fifteenth century, this double-sided drawing almost certainly results from a life-study session of models posed in the studio. Some of the studies made in these sessions focus on the nude body (or more often the nearly nude body, as in the case of IV, 2, a slightly later study drawn from assistants posing in their undergarments),² while others, including this sheet, would have been done mainly for the purposes of studying drapery. Although the figures seem as though they could be inserted into paintings—the recto might be a contemplative Apostle and the verso an abbot or bishop—they do not appear in Filippino’s works. More to the point, they were probably not made with specific works in mind but rather were standard workshop exercises that developed as Florentine tradition turned away from the practice of copying from model books and began instead to favor sketchbooks, in which each artist drew from life rather than copying previous drawings. The drawn drapery studies can also be considered akin to contemporary drapery studies by Verocchio and his workshop as well as those by Leonardo—although the latter’s are admittedly in a more elaborate technique.³

The loosely brushed ground applied to this sheet, so thin that the laid lines of the paper may be seen through it, is in contrast to the more careful, evenly applied ground layer usually found in drawings of this type. It is not the only such example by Filippino and thus seems a deliberate choice. One wonders whether he may have adopted the practice to give what are often careful drawings a sense of immediacy and freshness. Indeed, it is matched in this example by the notably lively, sketchy handling of the metalpoint. That freeness as well as the elegant faces of the seated men have caused the drawings to be attributed occasionally to Botticelli himself rather than to his talented pupil and assistant Filippino. As Elizabeth Barker has observed, however, the curious and unsettling tendency to show figures from two viewpoints, with the head and torso seen from slightly below and the lap and legs from above, is typical of Filippino’s work from his early years, around 1475, and points to him as the artist responsible for this drawing. She notes that a comparison may be seen in the figure of the Virgin in the Virgin and Child with St. Anthony of Padua and a Monk in Budapest.⁴ —JJM

Footnotes:

1. Goldner in New York 1997–98, 15.
2. On this drawing, see, most recently, Marciari in New York 2017–18, 33–34. For early examples by Filippino himself, see New York 1997– 98, no. 11, although it might be noted that those drawings have at times (e.g., Berenson 1961, 2: nos. 1355B and 853A) been attributed to Davide Ghirlandaio or to Filippino’s workshop, like IV, 2 itself.
3. For the drapery studies by Verocchio and his workshop, including Leonardo, see New York 2003, nos. 13–17.
4. New York 1997–98, no. 13.