L'Apparition du Christ à la Vierge

Filippino Lippi had just come back to Florence from Rome, where he had covered a chapel in fresco, when he painted this around 1493. He was the son of a famous painter, Fra Filippo Lippi, a monk who had run off with a nun, so his own name carried a story before he ever lifted a brush. The subject here is an unusual one, rarely painted, and was probably spelled out by whoever commissioned it: the risen Christ appearing to his mother, with the kneeling Virgin flanked by other holy figures beneath a golden burst of God among the clouds. Behind them the land fades into a soft blue haze, and far off sits a misty city with a great dome, almost certainly Florence and its cathedral, the place Filippino had only just returned to.