The Miracles of Prato

by Laurie Albanese

  I watched him all week, and remained by his side to assure his diligence, Cantansanti had written. He worked, God he worked, and then last night he took off, I know not where.

  “I know I’ve missed the promised date.” Fra Filippo refused to hang his head. “But you can see the work is good.”

  Ser Francesco shifted in his heavy boots and picked up the correspondence he’d received that morning.

  “Look.” Cantansanti thrust a rumpled parchment toward Fra Filippo. “Look at it.”

  Fra Filippo heard Lucrezia soothing the child. He steeled himself and took the paper, blinking in confusion.

  “What is this?” he asked at last.

  “The Medici have approved your sketch for the frame. It will take many months, but it is to be executed as you described. In great detail, and at great expense. This is an order for the woodwork.”

  “You said no more money,” Fra Filippo managed to say.

  “There is none,” the emissary said sharply. “The money will go through Ser Bartolomeo, who will place the order according to your specifications. The sketch for the frame is impressive, Filippo, I commend you. And the altarpiece.” The emissary brushed a hand through the air, to move the painter to one side. “The altarpiece is magnificent. Each part of the work is as good as anything you’ve ever done. Better.”

  He’d written to Cosimo’s son, in whose charge the work had come to be:

  Good Giovanni,

  The man is surely mad and forever finding trouble, and yet his work is brilliant, unsurpassed in splendor. He will finish it, if I have to beat him to do it, or else you can send your agent Bartolomeo, who may have more patience with the painter than I.

  “The light, the forest, the hands of God.” The emissary leaned closer to the panel, studying the layers of colors in the scene of the Adoring Madonna. “The colors are so brilliant, it’s as if you’d held a mirror to the window and captured what God put into the reflection.”

  Ser Francesco shook his head. He’d been living too long in the painter’s world.

  “But the Christ child,” he said, pointing at the blank oval. “Where is the infant’s face?”

  He looked at the monk, whose hands, for once, appeared to be scrubbed clean.

  “But of course,” Cantansanti said wryly. “These things take time.”

  In the bedroom, Lucrezia nursed the baby. She put a finger into his lips to break the suction and move him from one breast to the other. Filippino let out a gasp, and then a robust cry.

  The men heard it, and looked at each other.

  “I can see the face now,” Fra Filippo said with a smile. “Yes, Ser Francesco, now I can finish the piece.”

  “Then get to work, Brother,” the emissary said, picking up his cloak and turning to the door. “I’ll be watching you. Remember, the eye of the Medici is on you, always.”

  Epilogue

  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 mov
es 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.

  Authors’ Note

  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.

  Acknowledgments

  Our agent, Marly Rusoff, provided unwavering enthusiasm and insights that were crucial to the completion of this novel, as was the support of Michael Radulescu. We were fortunate to work with an editor as smart and enthusiastic as Jennifer Brehl, who made the book better than it was before. We are especially grateful for Mary Schuck’s stunning jacket design, and for the support of Lisa Gallagher, Ben Bruton, and Sharyn Rosenblum at William Morrow. In Prato, we had the gracious help of Claudio Cerretelli, Simona Biagianti, Odette Pagliai, and Paolo Saccoman. Daniel G. Van Slyke, associate professor of church history at Kenrick-Glennon Seminary, patiently answered our many questions.

  The opportunity for us to write this novel together was nothing short of miraculous. These pages spring from a friendship that goes beyond words, to shared bonds that stretch from the mystical to the mundane. We are each blessed by the love of a kindred spirit who made this collaboration an enriching, life-affirming journey.

  Professor Michael Mallory of Brooklyn College first introduced me to the art of Fra Filippo Lippi, and my professors at the Institute of Fine Arts instilled in me my knowledge of art history and my faith in myself as a writer on art. My husband, Eric Schechter, gave me endless support, and, despite being of Eastern European Jewish descent, is the finest Italian cook I have ever met. My daughters Isabelle, Olivia, and Anais sweeten the pot, always. I thank all of the following for their support and their friendship, which in ways large and small also helped to make this novel possible: Alison Smith, Monica Taylor, Pilar Lopez, Katica Urbanc, Neil and Kerry Metzger, Laura Berman, Mark Fortgang, Lisa Rafanelli, Françoise Lucbert, Barbara Larson, Robert Steinmuller, and Marilyn Morowitz.

  —Laura Morowitz

  My life is peopled with friends and relatives whose words, wisdom, vision, and creativity are daily nourishment. Writers (and readers) Emily Rosenblum, Toni Martin, and Anne Mernin gave me ongoing support and encouragement, and Nadine Billard never turned away my phone calls, no matter how dithering. My children, John and Melissa, have become expert at blocking all communications to my third-floor office when I am working, and I’m forever grateful for their love and respect. The grace that my dear friends Kathleen Tully and Matt Stolwyk each brought to their careful readings of the manuscript is a testament to their ge
nerous spirits. Thanks also to the many publishing people and teachers who have helped me along the way, especially Larry Ashmead, Jennifer Sheridan, Tavia Kowalchuk, Lisa Amoroso, Margo Sage-El and the staff at Watchung Booksellers, Jed Rosen, and Jagadisha, whose yoga studio is the most pleasant 105-degree room I have ever visited. My sisters and extended family, especially Donna, Linda, John, Paula, Andrea, and my mother-in-law, Rosemarie Helm, are ballast for my creative flights. And Frank, my husband, is a true gentleman who makes all things possible for me.

  —Laurie Lico Albanese

  Bibliographical Notes

  This is a work of fiction inspired by historical and biographical events, and we referred to many published materials for information about quattrocento Italian society and culture, and the life and work of Fra Filippo Lippi. Although we relied heavily on the following sources, any mistakes or inaccuracies are our own, and are the product of artistic liberties taken for the harmony and integrity of the novel.

  For detailed information on Fra Filippo Lippi, we returned many times to the works of two American art historians: Jeffrey Ruda, Fra Filippo Lippi: Life and Work (London: Phaidon, 1993) and Megan Holmes, Fra Filippo Lippi the Carmelite Painter (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1999). Two Italian texts dedicated to the fresco series in Prato were of great use to us: Mario Salmi, Gli affreschi nel Duomo del Prato (Bergamo: Istituto italiano d’arti grafiche, 1944) and I Lippi a Prato (Prato: Museo Civico, 1994).

  Excellent introductions to the context and style of fifteenth-century Italian art are found in Frederick Hartt, History of Italian Renaissance Art (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1976) and Evelyn Welch, Art in Renaissance Italy 1350–1500 (London: Oxford History of Art, 2001). Michael Baxandall’s Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972) remains the fundamental text on the way in which works functioned in Lippi’s day.