カマルドリの礼拝

Around 1463 Lucrezia Tornabuoni, wife of Piero de' Medici and mother of Lorenzo the Magnificent, paid to fit out a private cell at Camaldoli, a remote hermitage high in the Tuscan Apennines where the family liked to retreat. Filippo Lippi, a friar himself, painted this for it. Mary kneels in a dark wood to adore the newborn Christ laid on the grass among spring flowers, while the young John the Baptist picks his way through the trees and Saint Romuald, the white-robed hermit who had founded Camaldoli roughly four centuries earlier, stands to the side. The tall firs behind them are the actual silver firs of that forest, the ones the monks tended. It is a version Lippi had worked out a few years before for the Medici chapel in Florence, reused here for a quieter, colder place.