Russian Artworks Foreign Italian Painting Renaissance Filippino Lippi, Crucifixion with the Virgin and St Francis

Filippino Lippi, Crucifixion with the Virgin and St Francis

Date: 1498–1500
Dimensions: 186 x 179 cm (main panel)
Ownership: Galleria dell’Accademia, Florence (side panels)
Provenance:
Main panel:
Church of San Procolo, Florence
Edward Solly collection (1818)
Kaiser Friedrich Museum, Berlin (1821)
Side panels:
Church of San Procolo, Florence
Galleria dell’Accademia, Florence
Filippino Lippi, Crucifixion with the Virgin and St Francis

Filippino Lippi painted this altarpiece around 1498–1500 for the funerary chapel of Francesco Valori in the Church of San Procolo in Florence. The Valori family was close to the Medici and prominent in Florentine politics for five generations. Francesco Valori was Gonfaloniere of Justice in 1497 and an influential supporter of Girolamo Savonarola. He was beheaded in April 1498, close to the Church of San Procolo, by the same angry mob which stormed San Marco (leading to Savonarola’s capture and execution on Piazza della Signoria on 23 May 1498).

The main panel depicted The Crucifixion with the Virgin and St Francis and was flanked by two side panels of St John the Baptist and St Mary Magdalene. The altarpiece was removed, dismembered and sold under Napoleon in 1808. The two side panels ended up in the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence, while the main panel was purchased by Edward Solly and then sold to King Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia in 1821. The Crucifixion with the Virgin and St Francis was presented to the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum in Berlin and was destroyed in 1945 during the Second World War.

Filippino Lippi’s altarpiece was seen as a return to a more Gothic style, reflecting the influence of Girolamo Savonarola. Above the altarpiece in the chapel was a fresco depicting St Francis Receiving the Stigmata.

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