Page:The painters of Florence from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century (1915).djvu/268

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FILIPPINO LIPPI
[1457-

1504, and was buried two days later in San Michele Bisdomini, amidst tokens of universal grief and respect. "And all the shops in the Via de' Servi were closed," writes Vasari, "when he was borne to his burial, as is only done, for the most part, at the funerals of princes." His unfinished picture was completed after his death, by the Umbrian master Perugino, who added the group of the fainting Virgin and weeping women at the foot of the Cross.

Filippino's best scholar was Raffaellino del Garbo, who accompanied him to Rome as his assistant, and worked both under him and Botticelli. A very unequal artist, Raffaellino never fulfilled the promise of his youth, and after Filippino's death adopted exaggerated gestures and mannerisms which ruined his art. His best pictures are a charming Madonna with Angels playing musical instruments in a flowery meadow, at Berlin, a Resurrection, painted in oils, and closely resembling Filippino's style, which originally hung in the Capponi chapel at Monte Oliveto, and the Pietà, formerly ascribed to Botticelli, at Munich. This last work is so powerful and dramatic in character, and so full of intense feeling, that we can have little doubt the conception is due to Botticelli, and the picture was painted from some design of his later years. Raffaellino died in 1524, at the age of fifty-eight.

Chief Works
Filippino:
Florence.—Accademia: 89. St. Mary of Egypt. 93. St. John the Baptist. 98. Deposition.