Incoronazione Marsuppini

Carlo Marsuppini was one of the leading humanist scholars of his age and chancellor of the Florentine republic, the man who gave the funeral oration for the historian Leonardo Bruni. When his father Gregorio died in 1444, Carlo commissioned this Coronation of the Virgin from Filippo Lippi for a family chapel near Arezzo, and both men kneel inside their own altarpiece, presented by saints at the lower edges. Lippi kept the manner deliberately grave and old-fashioned, close to Fra Angelico, with ranks of musician angels flanking the central crowning of Mary. The panel had a rough afterlife. In 1785 the monastery that held it was suppressed and the picture was cut into three and sold, before being reassembled and taken to the Vatican.