Lippo di Benivieni
Italian · Gothic
The story
Almost nothing is known about the life of Lippo di Benivieni, a painter working in Florence in the years around 1300. The earliest trace of him is a document from 1296 recording that he took on an apprentice, which means he was already established by then. He appears on the rolls of the Arte dei Medici e Speziali, the Florentine guild that painters belonged to, between 1312 and 1320.
No single surviving painting carries his name. The body of work now given to him was assembled by scholars, above all the art historian Richard Offner, who grouped panels by their shared hand. That reconstructed Lippo was a contemporary of Giotto, the Florentine who was remaking painting at the time, yet his figures answer more to Sienese art, the softer and more decorative manner of the followers of Duccio in nearby Siena.
Because his work rests on attribution rather than signature, individual panels move in and out of his catalogue as scholarly opinion shifts.
