Kreuzigung

Filippino Lippi came from Prato, the Tuscan town where this small panel still hangs, and he grew up in paint. His father was the celebrated friar-painter Fra Filippo Lippi, who died when the boy was young, leaving him to finish his training in Botticelli's Florence workshop. This little Crucifixion, in tempera and barely a foot tall, was made for private devotion around the turn of the 16th century, something to pray in front of at home rather than a public altarpiece. Filippino and his assistants liked the composition enough to repeat it, and near-identical versions of this size survive elsewhere, including one at Yale. Christ hangs against an open Tuscan landscape of the kind Filippino had painted at full scale on the chapel walls of Florence and Rome.