The Brancacci Chapel of Santa Maria del Carmine
Florence, Italy
Thursday of the Twenty-first Week of Advent, the Year of Our Lord 1481
Light filters through the stained-glass window of the small chapel in Santa Maria del Carmine, and falls on the artist. The man on the scaffolding is large, with shoulder-length brown hair and a well-defined mouth. Chewing his bottom lip, he takes measure of the flesh tones he’s been laboring over this afternoon, slowly layering ochre onto the green undertones in the face of Saint Peter on the throne.
The artist sighs. It is painstaking work, repairing this fresco created by the great Masaccio.
As he dips his brush into the ochre paint, the young man shakes his head at the ruin: more than forty faces in the scene depicting Saint Peter raising the son of Theophilus from the dead, and at least ten of them damaged beyond recognition. It’s difficult for him to understand why the Medici, of all people, would have allowed this great work to be destroyed in their honor, in damnatio memoriae. Yet the faces of the Brancacci family and friends—the Medici’s enemies—were scratched out in a fury of vengeance in 1434, and have remained destroyed for nearly fifty years.
It’s a warm day. Below the scaffolding, the monks and a cadre of priests carry on in a hum of activity, getting ready for evening Mass. The painter’s assistants are cleaning their brushes and storing their supplies as they prepare to go home. Daylight is fading, but the artist isn’t ready to stop working. Having accepted the weighty job of restoring the frescoes to their original splendor, he’s been in the chapel every day studying the shapes of the men depicted, the careful arrangement of figures, their expressive faces filled with suspicion, awe, anger, and hope.
These are not just the faces of anonymous men: many are painted to honor the friars of Santa Maria del Carmine. There is a self-portrait of Masaccio himself, and one of the figures has been painted to resemble the great Leon Battista Alberti.
Leaning closer, the artist uses his fingernail to remove a flake of chipped paint from a nobleman’s chin. The way the work has been damaged only accentuates the power of the hand that created it: the weighty robes of the figures, the solid architecture of the building in Antioch where the miracle took place. As he studies the work, the artist closes his eyes and remembers the first time he stood beside his father, on a similar scaffolding in the church of Spoleto. His father’s hands, caked in paint, had been strong and sure beside his own young, tentative fingers.
“Hold your hand steady, and wait. Inspiration will come when you’re ready.”
His father has been dead twelve years, but the young man remembers his words clearly, and thinks of them each morning as he prepares to work.
“To paint is to pray. To pray is to paint. Remember this, and God will be with you each time you take up your brush.”
The words ring in the son’s memory, and he sees his father touching his shoulder, tracing the perspectival lines, turning his face into the light, showing him how to draw the curve of a woman’s shoulder or to portray a man’s anger in strong, sure strokes.
“Wait until you’re certain. Then, be bold.”
Filippino Lippi opens his eyes and surveys the fresco. All the figures surrounding young Theophilus’s tomb are men. For once, there is no Madonna.
All his life, it seems, Filippino Lippi has been looking at blond and lovely Madonnas—each one resembling his mother with her pale skin, her warm blue eyes, the cinabrese lips. He’s lived apart from her for most of his life, yet his mother’s beloved face is indelible in his mind. The paintings his father and his followers created with her likeness are everywhere, looking over him, waiting for him.
“God’s perfect rendering of heaven on earth,” his father would say, showing the boy his Madonnas.
Although his parents made their homes in different cities for the last years of his father’s life, and Fra Filippo never lost his charm with women, Filippino is sure that his father remained devoted to his mother and that he loved her above all others, in his own way.
Filippino thinks of his mother, who lives now in close proximity to his sister, Alessandra, and her family, in Florence. Lucrezia’s life hasn’t been easy, but she doesn’t complain.
“There’s always blood and struggle,” she says, whenever trouble looms. “But from blood come strength and beauty.”
The first time she spoke those words to him he was young, having wrenched his shoulder and skinned his knee falling from a tree outside the bottega. She’d helped him up, stroked his cheek, and cleaned his wound with a cool cloth. Her spine was straight, her eyes blue, her smile sad and wise.
“From blood comes strength, and beauty. Remember this, my Filippino.”
Later that same day, she’d given him a small silver medallion of Saint John the Baptist.
“A gift from my own mother, which I pass to you,” she’d said, her breath warm on his cheek.
Filippino Lippi, a man as large as his father and as beautiful as his mother, fingers the medallion he has sewn into the hem of his tunic. Then he steps back, picks up a brush heavy with terra verde, and moves toward the fresco once again. He squints, and purses his lips. The lips are his mother’s, full and sensuous. But the hands, the eyes, the sharp gaze: these are from his father. He waits. And when the intuizione moves through him, he begins again.