Stories of St. Stephen and St. John the Baptist (Lippi)

The Stories of St. Stephen and St. John the Baptist is a fresco cycle by the Italian Renaissance painter Filippo Lippi and his assistants, executed between 1452 and 1465. It is located in the Great Chapel (Cappella Maggiore) of the Cathedral of Prato, Italy.

Geminiano Inghirami, the preposto of the Cathedral of Prato, then capitular church, was at the time an influential man in culture and politics, with important friendships in Rome and Florence. He himself a humanist, he often commissioned artworks to Renaissance artists, and sometimes called them in Prato, such as with Donatello and Michelozzo for the cathedral's external pulpit. The city decided to decorate the Great Chapel in the church in 1440, allocating a budget of 1200 gold florins for the work. Inghirami asked archbishop Antonino Pierozzi to call Fra Angelico. However, the aging friar, perhaps due to the extent of the work or because he was already committed to other works, declined the offer. Next was Fra Filippo Lippi, who accepted and established himself in Prato in 1452. Collaborators he brought with him included Fra Diamante, who had been his companion in noviciate.

The completion of the work took fourteen years, with lates, pauses and scandals, such as that involving the painter (also a professed Carmelite friar and ordained priest) and a nun from the monastery of Santa Margherita, where Lippi had been chaplain from 1456 to the issue of a tamburazione (secret accusation) in May 1461. Her name was Lucrezia Buti: after acting as his model for some paintings, she gave birth to two children, Filippino Lippi in 1457 and Alexandra in 1465. The two lived together in a house near the city's Duomo. Once the scandal broke out, Lippi and Buti fled from the city. According to his biographer Giorgio Vasari, Pope Eugene IV released, only after the intercession of Cosimo de' Medici, Lippi from his vows and "had offered in his lifetime to give him a dispensation, that he might make Lucrezia (...) his legitimate wife, but [that] Fra Filippo desiring to retain the power of living after his own fashion, and of indulging his love of pleasure as might seem good to him, did not care to accept that offer." It was however Pope Pius II that granted them the dispensation allowing them to marry.

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