Fra Filippo Lippi the Carmelite Painter. (Reviews).

Megan Holmes. Fra Filippo Lippi the Carmelite Painter

New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1999. ix + 301 pp. + 234 b/w and color pls. $65. ISBN: 0-300-08104-9.

In this fluid and beautifully crafted book Megan Holmes gives new and rich insight into the religious context and the societal patterns that framed the works made between the 1430s and the 1450s by the Carmelite painter Fra Filippo Lippi. She moves easily between the formation of his institutional sensibility within the cloister of Sta. Maria del Carmine in Florence, the representational practices of Carmelites in general, and the social function of the images he produced beyond the cloister as a friar painter (frate dipintore) who served the religious concerns of his patrons and the churches and monasteries in which his pictures were displayed.

Despite a wide ranging approach to Florentine artistic activity, Holmes is clear about her purpose and informs her readers at the opening of each section and chapter precisely how she will proceed, ending each with a summary of her conclusions. Her introduction (3-5) establishes her primary focus as the religious context in which Fra Filippo lived and carried out his art. In the first part, entitled "The Claustrum" (cloister), she traces Fra Filippo's experience and activities within Santa Maria del Carmine and the nature of Carmelite imagery from the Duecento to the mid-Quattrocento. She considers Fra Filippo as a Carmelite practitioner and looks generally at monastic artistic production in Quattrocento Tuscany, "how it was regulated, how it differed from secular artistic practices and what kinds of representational solutions it generated" (5). In the second part, "The Seculum" (secular society), she follows Fra Filippo's activity in his external assignments, addresses innovations in his mature works and his awareness of the artistic experiments of his contemporaries. She notes his adaptable association with the Carmelite Order as he moved between claustrum and seculum. Holmes then devotes a chapter to Fra Filippo's painting practices, his workshop organization and his relationships with patrician patrons. She closes the section by noting ways in which he retained Carmelite metaphors within his mature works.

In the third part of her book, "Art and Religion in Renaissance Florence," Holmes evaluates three of Fra Filippo's altarpieces from the decade of the 1440s as "case studies" of how the patron's desires determined the imagery and how its public understood it. One of these was commissioned by Cosimo de' Medici for the Novitiate Chapel in Santa Croce; the others were commissioned for Benedictine nunnery churches in Florence. Holmes' selection allows her to clarify patronage requirements and perceptions that differ by gender and socio-religious opportunity.

I am impressed by the author's command of her complex subject, the clarity of her analyses, and her recognition and skill in addressing the challenges and merits of instability. Holmes notes (111) that Fra Filippo was precarious in his actions, moving transgressively between the spheres of cloister and secular society, each with its own traditions, rules and mores. But she also places him within broader evaluations of Renaissance religious life, noting that the symbolic language he employed was itself unstable, conveying different meanings to different individuals. Her understanding (4-5, citing Carolyn Bynum Walker) that Renaissance works of art are "polysemic" and dialectic, bearing multiple senses and multiple relationships between the senses, makes a major contribution to Renaissance scholarship that extends beyond the particulars of Fra Filippo Lippi and Florentine religious culture in which he worked. The interactions between pious devotion, ritual enactments at altars and the sacred beings represented in their altarpieces guarantee intercessory power over events and can even make future events occur. Although Holmes considers these matters, she might have applied them more forcefully to scholarly benefit.

At times I was troubled by dating revisions of individual works without further explanation and would have appreciated a brief consideration of the liturgy emphasized before individual altarpieces. But Professor Holmes is to be praised for her careful scholarship, her many instructive insights and for the apparent ease with which she presents her material. Both she and Yale Press are to be congratulated for a book that will long give its readers pleasure and understanding.