Restored Renaissance Masterpiece on View in New Installation at Metropolitan Museum
Filippino Lippi (1457-1504) is one of the great artists of 15th-century Florence. Among his principal patrons was the wealthy banker Filippo Strozzi (1428–1491), who in 1487 contracted the artist to decorate his funerary chapel in Santa Maria Novella with an outstanding cycle of frescoes. Around the same time, Strozzi also commissioned a Madonna and Child for his villa at Santuccio, west of the city. This work was acquired from the Duveen firm in 1928 by Jules Bache and was bequeathed to the Metropolitan Museum in 1949. In preparation for an exhibition on the artist that will be held in Rome next year, the picture was taken to conservation for examination this fall. A test cleaning revealed that beneath a thick, discolored varnish there was a beautifully preserved, richly colored painting. It emerged that the varnish had been artificially toned to create an almost monochromatic appearance—an amber-colored uniformity that conformed to the idea of how an Old Master should appear. So striking is the transformation that the picture seems a new acquisition.
To celebrate this restoration, The Metropolitan Museum of Art is mounting A Renaissance Masterpiece Revealed: Filippino Lippi’s Madonna and Child, a focused exhibition, beginning January 15, 2011, that will include the picture and a number of objects in the Museum’s permanent collection that can be associated with the Strozzi by their coat of arms, which has three crescent moons. The objects include a textile, a wooden chair, a cassone, and a column capital from the Palazzo Strozzi—the grandest of all 15th-century palaces in Florence. Filippo Strozzi belonged to one of the great patrician families of the city and played an important role there as an art patron. Although his father was exiled by the Medici in 1434, in 1466 Filippo was able to return to the city of his forebears, having made his fortune in the Strozzi bank in Naples. He set about rehabilitating the family’s prestige, in part by commissioning outstanding works of art such as Madonna and Child by Filippino Lippi.
The exhibition is organized by Keith Christiansen, John Pope-Hennessy Chairman of European Paintings. The painting was cleaned and restored by Associate Conservator Karen Thomas, overseen by Michael Gallagher, the Sherman Fairchild Conservator in Charge of Paintings Conservation.
The exhibition will be featured on the Museum’s website at www.metmuseum.org.
