Madonna and Child Enthroned

This panel carries its own date, painted into the throne in Latin: the year 1437. That makes it one of the few firm milestones in the career of Filippo Lippi, a Carmelite friar turned painter who was then in his early thirties and absorbing everything happening around him in Florence. You can watch him moving from the stern, sculptural manner of Masaccio toward the livelier space and detail that Donatello was bringing to the city. It was ordered by Giovanni Vitelleschi, a fighting archbishop from the coastal town of Tarquinia, probably for a palace he was building there. The painting stayed in Tarquinia, half-forgotten, until an art historian recognised it in a local church in 1917.