Figure study

This is a drawing, not a painting, and that alone makes it rare. Very little survives on paper from Lippi's hand, and here you catch him at the workbench rather than the altar. It is a study of a single male figure, worked out mainly for the way the cloth falls, the drapery gathering and breaking over the body in long careful folds. He made it late in his life, around 1463, and it lives now in the Uffizi's cabinet of drawings rather than out in the painting galleries. Sheets like this are where a Renaissance workshop did its thinking, testing a pose or a fall of fabric before committing it to a panel that could not be undone.