From Filippo Lippi to Piero della Francesca: Fra Carnevale and the Making of a Renaissance Master

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Portrait of a Woman and a Man at a Casement, ca. 1440. Fra Filippo Lippi (Italian, Florentine, b. ca. 1406, d. 1469). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Marquand Collection, Gift of Henry G. Marquand, 1889 (89.15.19). More About This Exhibition "What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet." —William Shakespeare Romeo and Juliet This is the story of an artist who trained in Florence, associated with a who’s who of Renaissance artists, became a Dominican friar, advised the ruler of his native Urbino on art and architecture, and painted some of the most fascinating works of the fifteenth century—and yet whose identity has long remained a mystery to scholars. "From Filippo Lippi to Piero della Francesca: Fra Carnevale and the Making of a Renaissance Master" centers on two celebrated paintings that were acquired from the Barberini Collection in Rome by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in the 1930s, and their enigmatic creator. It brings together nearly fifty major Renaissance works from thirty-three museums in Europe and the United States by such artists as Filippo Lippi, Domenico Veneziano, Luca della Robbia, Donatello, and Piero della Francesca, as well as all the paintings that can now be attributed to Fra Carnevale. Metropolitan Museum Director Philippe de Montebello commented: "This exhibition represents a breakthrough of scholarship. That the field of Renaissance art can yield such surprises as Fra Carnevale is truly gratifying." Mr. de Montebello continued, "He has long captivated specialists, not least because the great sixteenth-century artist/biographer Giorgio Vasari ascribed to him a lead role in the formation of the architect Bramante. The ways in which Fra Carnevale mastered and then developed the new art of Florence in a highly sophisticated fashion makes him a paradigm of the Renaissance artist." The exhibition is made possible by Bracco, the diagnostic imaging group. Additional support has been provided by the William Randolph Hearst Foundation and the Gail and Parker Gilbert Fund. The exhibition was organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Soprintendenza per il Patrimonio Storico e Etnoantropologico, Milan. More About the Works on View Exhibition Organization The Mystery of Fra Carnevale Exhibition Organizers and Credits Exhibition Publication Educational Programs

More About the Works on View
"In some ways, this is a detective story about identification—and about the meaning of style and identity in the Renaissance," stated Keith Christiansen, the Jayne Wrightsman Curator of European Paintings at the Metropolitan. "Only now, following extensive archival research, can we say for certain who painted the Barberini Panels: an artist from Urbino who trained in Florence and later advised Federico da Montefeltro on various architectural projects. Why has it been so difficult to give him a name? Identifying Fra Carnevale required grappling with such key issues as what we know about workshop practice, what we mean by artistic influence, and, most importantly, how fifteenth-century artists created an artistic identity and used it to assert their claim on the emerging concept of creative genius."

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Exhibition Organization
The story begins in Florence in the 1440s, in the workshop of Filippo Lippi, where Fra Carnevale is documented in 1445. This portion of the exhibition presents a panorama of Lippi’s art and includes a reunited triptych (ca. 1440) of the Madonna and Child (The Metropolitan Museum of Art) flanked by Saints Augustine and Ambrose and Saints Gregory and Jerome (Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti, Turin). In Lippi’s studio, Fra Carnevale came into contact, directly or indirectly, with the leading names and ideas of the Renaissance. The next section considers Fra Carnevale’s compatriots, artists who, like him, traveled to Florence to train and then returned to their native towns, including Giovanni Boccati, whose engaging Madonna of the Orchestra contains echoes of both Florentine and Paduan art. The final section brings together the surviving works by Fra Carnevale with a masterpiece by Piero della Francesca, Madonna and Child Attended by Angels (ca. 1460–70, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute).

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The Mystery of Fra Carnevale
Until recently, Fra Carnevale was little more than a name handed down by Giorgio Vasari. On account of the archival work undertaken for this exhibition, the artist now emerges with some clarity. Born Bartolomeo di Giovanni Corradini in Urbino, he trained under a late Gothic painter before moving to Florence and joining Filippo Lippi’s workshop. During these crucial years, he not only studied the work of other artists in the city, but made important contacts that would serve him well when he returned to Urbino in the service of Federico da Montefeltro, whom he advised on architecture. He joined the Dominican order, where he was given the name Fra Carnevale. He is associated with the first Renaissance architecture in the city, a remarkable portal on the church of San Domenico. He designed architectural features for the cathedral of the city and was involved with the Palazzo Ducale in Urbino. Sometime between 1456 and 1458 he became parish priest of a church in San Cassiano di Castelcavallino and increasingly concentrated on his parish responsibilities and the restoration of the church, which, unfortunately, has not survived.

His paintings testify to his deep interest in architecture. His masterpiece was an altarpiece of which the two surviving panels—The Birth of the Virgin (1466, The Metropolitan Museum of Art) and The Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple(?) (1466, The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), known as the Barberini Panels—are reunited in this exhibition.

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Exhibition Organizers and Credits
"From Filippo Lippi to Piero della Francesca: Fra Carnevale and the Making of a Renaissance Master" is organized by Keith Christiansen of the Metropolitan Museum, Matteo Ceriano, vice-director of the Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan, and Emanuele Daffra of the Soprintendenza per il Patrimonio Storico Artistico e Etnoantropologico, Milan, with the generous involvement of Federica Olivares. The exhibition was on view at the Pinacoteca di Brera through January 10, 2005.

Exhibition design at the Metropolitan is by Daniel Kershaw, exhibition designer, with graphic design by Barbara Weiss, graphic designer, and lighting by Clint Ross Coller and Richard Lichte, lighting designers, all of the Museum's Design Department.

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Exhibition Publication
The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue. Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, with Olivares, Milan, and distributed by Yale University Press, the publication is available in hardcover and paperback editions in the Museum's bookshops as well as online at The Met Store.

The exhibition catalogue is made possible by Bracco, the Oceanic Heritage Foundation, and the Samuel I. Newhouse Foundation Inc.

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Educational Programs
A variety of educational programs are offered in conjunction with the exhibition, including lectures and gallery talks. See the online calendar for a list of programs organized by date.

The Sunday at the Met program on February 27 will be dedicated to the exhibition and will bring together an international roster of scholars. This event is sponsored by the Italian Cultural Institute.

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