With the eye of the Medici upon him, Fra Filippo finished the altarpiece for King Alfonso and sent it to Naples in May 1458. Cosimo de’ Medici was not in attendance when the gift was presented at the palace, but a letter in the Medici archives confirms that the altarpiece was received favorably in the court, and that it pleased Alfonso the Magnanimous.
After a long illness, Pope Callistus III died in August 1458. In a surprising vote by the College of Cardinals, Enea Silvio Piccolomini was named Pope Pius II. The new pope had deep ties with the Medici; he also had two illegitimate children. Under Pope Pius II, Father Carlo de’ Medici, illegitimate son of Cosimo de’ Medici, became the provost of the Cathedral of Santo Stefano following the death of Gemignano Inghirami in 1460.
Undoubtedly encouraged by the Medici, Pope Pius II took an interest in the plight of Fra Filippo and his lover, Lucrezia Buti. Vatican records indicate that he granted dispensation for Fra Filippo and Lucrezia to marry in 1461.
However, Fra Filippo Lippi remained an ordained Carmelite monk for the rest of his life, while in 1459 Lucrezia Buti took her full vows as an Augustinian nun in the Convent Santa Margherita, in the presence of the vicar of Prato, the Bishop of Pistoia, and Prioress Jacoba de’ Bovacchiesi, who’d taken over for her sister, Bartolommea, as prioress of the convent. Several sources indicate that by 1461 Lucrezia was once again living at the home of Fra Filippo. If the two did become man and wife, there is no record of this union. Their second child, a daughter, Alessandra, was born in 1465.
Fra Filippo Lippi completed the frescoes in Prato in 1465 and went to Spoleto in 1467, where he lived with his son, Filippino, training him as an artist as they worked on the final fresco series of the painter’s life. When the painter died in Spoleto in 1469, guardianship of his son passed to his longtime assistant, Fra Diamante.
Filippino Lippi became a celebrated painter whose name and works are perhaps even more renowned than those of his father. In 1481, Filippino Lippi restored sections of the famed Masaccio frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel of Santa Maria del Carmine. The figures and faces of Brancacci friends and family—enemies of the Medici—had been destroyed in a damnatio memoriae when the exiled Medici returned to Florence in 1434. In an example of life’s beautiful symmetry, the son restored the very frescoes that had first inspired his father to become a painter when he was a young monk in the monastery of Santa Maria del Carmine.
It is undisputed that Fra Filippo Lippi was an ordained monk in the Carmelite Order. However, in historical accounts and legend, Lucrezia Buti is variably referred to as a novitiate, a nun, or simply as a young woman living in the Convent Santa Margherita at the time of her meeting with the painter. Similarly, historians are not in agreement concerning the date of her father’s death, nor the circumstances or even the year of her confinement to the convent with her sister Spinetta. The Convent Santa Margherita closed its doors in the late eighteenth century.
While Prioress Bartolommea de’ Bovacchiesi, Spinetta Buti, Fra Piero d’ Antonio di ser Vannozi, and Ser Francesco Cantansanti are true names of record along with those historical figures named above, the character of Prior General Ludovico Pietro di Saviano is a complete invention, as is Sister Pureza. If one imagines what could have compelled the artist and his young lover to live in defiance of Church law and the strict codes of conduct operative in fifteenth-century Italy, it seems undeniable that they were swayed and subjected to forces outside of their control, including the needs of powerful political figures and their own intense romantic longing.
The Feast of the Sacred Belt on September 8, 1456, is purportedly the day that Fra Filippo Lippi “kidnapped” Lucrezia Buti and took her to live at his bottega. The Sacred Belt, believed to be a miraculous relic of the Virgin Mary, has been housed in the locked chapel in the Cathedral of Santo Stefano in Prato, Italy, since the thirteenth century. It is presented to the public several times a year, most notably on the annual Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, which commemorates the birth of Mary on September 8. The Sacra Cintola has been recognized by the Church as a sacred relic for centuries, and was venerated by Pope John Paul II in 1986.
At the time of his meeting with Lucrezia Buti, Fra Filippo Lippi was a successful artist with many outstanding commitments and a record of legal problems. He’d been at work on the fresco series in the Church of Santo Stefano for six years, and dragging his feet on the Medici’s King Alfonso altarpiece for many months. The frescoes, which were finally completed in 1465, are a high point in the painter’s remarkable career. His cycle of frescoes was fully restored in the beginning of the twenty-first century under the auspices of the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage. The newly refurbished cycle, featuring the painter’s famed dancing Salome and the remarkable scene of the infant Saint Stephen being switched at birth, was reopened to the public in 2007.
The central panel of Fra Lippi’s Adoring Madonna, gifted to King Alfonso by the Medici, was destroyed or lost sometime after the sixteenth century. The side wings of the altarpiece depicting Saints Anthony Abbot and Saint Michael are now in the Cleveland Museum of Art in Ohio. The Madonna Giving the Sacra Cintola to Saint Thomas, with Saints Margaret, Gregory, Augustine, Raphael, and Tobias, in which both Lucrezia and Prioress Bartolommea appear, survives in the Palazzo Pretario of Prato as a testament to the incredible love between a cloistered woman and the extraordinary painter-monk who left behind some of the most beautiful artwork of all time.