The story
Two painters named Lippi hang in this museum, father and son, and both belong to Prato. Filippo Lippi, a Carmelite friar from Florence, spent years here from the 1450s painting the frescoes of the cathedral choir. In Prato he met Lucrezia Buti, a young nun, and their son Filippino was born in the town in 1457.
The father's Madonna del Ceppo was painted in 1452 and 1453 for the Ceppo, a charity founded by the Prato merchant Francesco di Marco Datini, and Datini himself appears in it, presenting the four officials who ran the fund to the Virgin. The son is here with a street tabernacle he frescoed in 1498 for a corner of the Mercatale square. Bombs shattered it in March 1944, and the restorer Leonetto Tintori recovered the fragments and pieced the fresco back together.
The building around them was the palace of Prato's medieval magistrates, joined together from three older structures in the late 13th and early 14th centuries, with a pale limestone wing added in the 1330s. The town's picture gallery moved in from the city hall in 1912. The museum closed for restoration in 1998 and reopened about 15 years later, and its rooms now run from Bernardo Daddi's 14th-century polyptych to sculptures and drawings given by the foundation of the modern sculptor Jacques Lipchitz.
