A Beardless Carmelite Saint

This Beardless Carmelite Saint from about 1426, now at Berlin's Gemäldegalerie, is among the earliest paintings attributed to Lippi. As a young Carmelite friar at the convent of Santa Maria del Carmine in Florence, Lippi would have had Masaccio's revolutionary frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel as a daily visual education, and their influence pervades even his earliest efforts. Characteristic of Lippi's approach, the work displays elegant linear grace, tender humanity, lyrical Madonna types, decorative refinement.

The youthful saint's face shows an emerging naturalism in its individualized features, though the gold ground and formal pose retain the conventions of late Gothic devotional painting that Lippi was only beginning to transcend.