Filippo Lippi and workshop

In the late 1450s Fra Filippo Lippi was living in Prato, a town near Florence, where he spent more than a decade on frescoes for the choir of the cathedral. His shop there took on other jobs at the same time, and the name Filippo Lippi and workshop is used when the design is his but much of the painting was done by the people working under him.

Three small scenes in the National Gallery in London carry this label. They come from the predella, the row of little pictures along the foot of an altarpiece made for a church in Pistoia. Infrared photographs show that their underdrawing is quick and free, which points to Lippi as the designer. The painting itself is uneven. The scene of Saint Mamas has been given to an assistant known only as the Master of the Johnson Nativity, named after a picture in the Johnson Collection in Philadelphia, who may have been the Florentine painter Domenico di Zanobi. A fourth scene from the same predella, showing Saint Jerome, is more finely painted and may be by Lippi's own hand.