Filippino Lippi

For half a century a chapel in Florence sat unfinished. Masaccio and Masolino had begun the frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel in the 1420s and left them incomplete, and around 1485 the job of finishing them fell to Filippino Lippi, who matched his manner to two dead masters so tactfully that visitors long argued over which hand painted what.

His own story was a scandal to begin with. He was the son of Fra Filippo Lippi, a Carmelite friar and celebrated painter, and Lucrezia Buti, a young nun the friar had run off with, an affair that needed a papal dispensation to settle. His father died when the boy was about 12, and Filippino trained on in the workshop of Botticelli, whose delicate, nervous line you can feel in his own.

He became one of the busiest painters in Florence and Rome, filling the Strozzi Chapel in Florence and the Carafa Chapel in Rome with crowded, inventive, almost restless scenes. He died in 1504, and it was said the shops along the streets of Florence closed on the day of his funeral.