While yet in his first youth, this master completed the Chapel of the Brancacci, in the church of the Carmine, at Florence, which had been commenced by Masolino, and continued but not entirely finished by Masaccio,[1] who was also interrupted in his labours by death. It was thus from the hand of Filippo that the work received its ultimate perfection, that master completing what remained to be accomplished of an unfinished picture, representing SS. Pietro and Paolo, who restore the nephew of the emperor from the dead. In the figure of the undraped youth, Filippo portrayed the features of the painter Francesco Granacci, then very young; he also depicted that of the Cavalier, Messer Tommaso Soderini, in this work, with those of Piero Guicciardini, father of Messer Francesco, who has written the Storie; of Piero del Pugliese, of the poet Luigi Pucci, of Antonio Pollaiuolo, and finally of himself, as a youth, which he then was; the last-mentioned portrait he never painted again in all the rest of his life, for which cause it has not been possible to procure a likeness of him at a more advanced age.[2] In the story following this, Filippo painted the portrait of his master, Sandro Botticello, with many other friends and distinguished men; among these was the broker, Baggio, a man of singular talent and very witty, the same who executed the whole Inferno of Dante, in relief, on a shell, with all the “circles” and divisions of its dark caverns, and, finally, its lowest deep; all the figures, and every other minutia, are measured in their exact proportions, and all as they had been most ingeniously imagined and described by that great poet, which was at the time considered an admirable performance. Filippo afterwards painted a picture in tempera for the chapel of Francesco del Pugliese at Campora, a place belonging to the monks of the abbey, outside the gate of Florence. The subject of this work is San Bernardo, who is in a wood writing, and to whom our Lady appears, surrounded by Angels; it has been much admired for the various accessories introduced by the painter; as, for
- ↑ See the lives of Masolino and Masaccio respectively, vqI. i.
- ↑ The portraits of Antonio Pollaiuolo and Filippo are not in the picture here named, but in that of St. Peter condemned to death.
many books in the possession of a son of Filippino, filled with drawings of the Roman antiquities, which the latter had taken from the originals.
