Lippo d' Andrea Florence 1377 - after 1427

We are grateful to Everett Fahy for proposing an attribution to Lippo d’Andrea, after first-hand inspection of the painting.

This panel, which comes from the predella of an altarpiece, was painted by Lippo d’Andrea, the artist formerly known as the “Pseudo-Ambrogio di Baldese.” Scholars now unanimously accept that artist’s identification with Lippo but, until recently, the “Pseudo-Ambrogio di Baldese” was thought to be Ventura di Moro, whose signed Madonna and Child in the Pinacoteca, Siena, acted as a benchmark in reconstructing his œuvre (see E. Carli, “Chi è lo Pseudo Ambrogio di Baldese?”, in Scritti di Storia dell’Arte in onore di Valerio Mariani, Milan 1971, pp. 109-12). Following Carli’s publication, Serena Padovani identified the frescoes in the Nerli chapel in the church of Santa Maria del Carmine, Florence, which had generally been ascribed to the “Pseudo-Ambrogio di Baldese”, to have been painted by Lippo d’Andrea, named by Vasari as “Lippo fiorentino” (see S. Padovani, “San Michele Arcangelo”, in Tesori d’arte antica a San Miniato al Tedesco, Genoa 1979, pp. 55-57). More recent studies have attempted to construct Lippo d’Andrea’s œuvre around pictures formerly given to the “Pseudo-Ambrogio di Baldese”, starting with the polyptych at Yale University, New Haven (see L. Pisani, “Pittura tardogotica a Firenze negli anni Trenta del Quattrocento: il caso dello Pseudo-Ambrogio di Baldese”, in Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, vol. XLV, 2001, pp. 1-36, reproduced fig. 1; and S. Chiodo, “Lippo d’Andrea: problemi di iconografia e stile”, in Arte Cristiana, vol. XC, no. 808, January - February 2002, pp. 1-16, reproduced fig. 1).