Collection Highlights

Filippino Lippi's magnificent Holy Family with the Infant Saint John and Saint Margaret is one of his crowning late works. Dating from the late fifteenth century, it is among the finest Florentine Renaissance paintings in America. Indeed, it provided a model for the high standards of the Museum's subsequent acquisitions.

Filippino's natural father, Fra Filippo Lippi, and his teacher, the renowned Botticelli, introduced and perfected tondo painting. The technique offered Renaissance painters and relief sculptors from Donatello to Raphael the ultimate compositional challenge: accommodating figures and backgrounds within a circle. Tondos particularly appealed to the Florentine affinity for line and rhythmical movement.

The Holden Tondo--so-called after its generous donors-combines the figural solidity and robustness of Fra Filippo with the delicacy and lyrical play of curving lines of Botticelli. The unusual presence of Saint Margaret with the Holy Family suggests that the painting may have been commissioned by the Convent of Saint Margaret in Prato, where Filippino's mother, Lucrezia Buti, had lived.

Northern Gothic in appearance, the city appearing in the distant background is similar to the backdrops in Filippino's other late works. A richly ornamented classical pillar forms the immediate background for the figures. The use of such a detail surely reflects Filippino's fascination with the classical ruins he encountered while working in Rome at the end of the century when this masterpiece was created.

Purchase from the Delia E. Holden Fund and from a fund donated as a memorial to Mrs. Holden by her children: Guerdon S. Holden, Delia Holden White, Roberta Holden Bole, Emery Holden Greenough, Gertrude Holden McGinley. 1932.227