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Frederick Hartt, in his widely acclaimed survey of Italian Renaissance art,2 sought to present individual works of art in the context of contemporary history, show how they fulfilled specific needs, and identify their intended meaning. Nevertheless, in the seven pages dedicated to Fra Filippo Lippi, the prime foci of interest are the artist's influences, stylistic development, and influence on later artists. Only one painting, the Madonna Adoring Her Child, from the late 1450s, painted for the Medici Palace chapel, is discussed in any detail in terms of its iconography, the sources and significance of its specific penitential imagery. Hartt, tacitly acknowledging Lippi's reputation for immorality, also comments on the odd choice of artist for a penitential subject. This, he supposes, Lippi accepted out of necessity. Hartt thus hints at, but does not expand on a pragmatic element in the exchange between a Renaissance artist and his worldly patron.
The discourse exemplified by Beck, Hartt, and others like them employs a methodology of stylistic analysis for which a detached objectivity has been tacitly claimed. It has, however, also been driven by humanist assumptions about Renaissance art and culture. Admired as the fountainhead from which modernity springs, Renaissance art is seen as manifesting the best of human endeavor when first liberated from the grip of medieval religion. It is at once more rational and less mystical, because no longer corrupted by the hocus pocus of religious superstition. It is not difficult, therefore, to see how and why a Marxist critique has exposed the alleged objectivity of stylistic analysis masking ideological agendas. After all, who—other than privileged white males and their decadent offspring—has either the time or money to bother themselves with the study of form and the contemplation of beauty? Besides, it takes but a second look to realize that such art was inevitably determined in myriad ways by its context—social, economic, political and religious alike. Thus, over the last decades, revisionist art historians have been looking more closely at the context, function, and meaning of art—in process often downplaying formal analysis and matters of style, but ideally integrating these concerns with the newer ones.
As soon as context, function, and meaning are taken seriously with respect to Italian Renaissance art, one is obliged to consider the relationship of art and religion, since most Renaissance art served religious functions of one sort or another. In the case of Fra Filippo Lippi, the need is all the more trenchant, since he was a Carmelite friar and a beneficed priest as well as a maker of religious images. These are the assumptions underlying Megan Holmes' scrupulously researched study, Fra Filippo Lippi: The Carmelite Painter. Her focus is the religious context of Lippi's life and art, and the range of meanings communicated through it. She notes especially that Lippi—as a friar-painter working in Florence at a time (the 1430s– 1450s) when Florentine society was undergoing significant political, religious, and economic transition—was well-placed to explore critical issues within religious representation. Indeed, as she points out, at precisely that time, "religious art was the principal site where new artistic conceptions and technologies came into collision with traditional practices and values," with two monastic artists—Fra Filippo and Fra Angelico (an Observant Dominican)—the leading protagonists of innovation.
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