Special thanks to the Microsoft Corporation for permission to use following biographical information from Microsoft® Encarta '97:
Filippino Lippi was an Italian artist whose agitated style set the stage for 16th-century Mannerism. He was son of the famous Renaissance painter Fra Filippo Lippi, but his early work is closer to that of the painter Sandro Botticelli in whose Florentine workshop he studied. His works share the grace and fluency of both his master's and his father's style. Filippino's mature works, however, starting with The Vision of Saint Bernard (1486?, Badia, Florence, Italy), are increasingly strained and tense, with darker colors, harsher lighting effects, and more jagged lines.
Filippino's later work culminated in his frescoes for the Strozzi Chapel (1497?-1502, Santa Maria Novella, Florence). Illustrating the lives of Saint John and Saint Phillip, these frescoes depict an ancient world heavy with archaeological detail and overlaid with tension, while the chosen subject matter dwells upon the dramatic, bizarre, and horrifying episodes in the saints' lives. His expressively distorted art foreshadowed the later Italian Mannerist school.
