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Panel from a Triptych: The Archangel Michael
Fra Filippo Lippi (Italian, c. 1406–1469)
1458
- Medium
- tempera on wood panel
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- Framed: 94 x 40 x 6.5 cm (37 x 15 3/4 x 2 9/16 in.); Unframed: 81.3 x 29.8 x 3 cm (32 x 11 3/4 x 1 3/16 in.)
- Culture
- Italy, Florence
- Museum
- Cleveland Museum of Art, Medieval Art
- Credit line
- Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Teens profiles and older: its museum says too little about what it shows to place it for younger viewers. How works are placed
View at the Cleveland Museum of Art
About this work
These panels depicting Saints Anthony the Abbot and Michael originally flanked a central scene of the Madonna and Child with Angels, now lost, to form a triptych. Giovanni di Cosimo de’Medici of Florence commissioned the ensemble in 1457 as a gift to Alfonso V of Aragon. Fra Filippo Lippi, a Carmelite friar and one of the great masters of early Renaissance Florence, depicted realistic, weighty figures in a three-dimensional space using a system of linear perspective, inspired partly by Masaccio’s Brancacci Chapel, and reflected in the background architecture. Saint Anthony the Abbot rejected all earthly possessions in pursuit of a contemplative life in the desert. He is generally regarded as the founder of monasticism and is depicted wearing a monk’s habit. Saint Michael’s sword and shield refer to his role as heaven’s defender against evil.
