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A room adjacent to the hall on the first floor is dedicated to Filippino Lippi, the greatest of Prato's painters, and other masters of the late 15th and early 16th century: Francesco Botticini, Raffaellino del Garbo and Luca Signorelli.
By Filippino, the Tabernacle of the Mercatale has been admired over the centuries as one of Prato's masterpieces due to the exceptional tenderness of the scene and its unique modulation of light. The Madonna and Child with Saints painted for the Audience Hall of the Palazzo Comunale is a work of rare intensity and veiled sadness. Lastly, the small Christ Crucified purchased in 2010 by the City at a Christie's auction in New York represents a precious document of the artist's maturity. This is when he approached Savonarola's ideas and was influenced by the restless religious climate at the end of the century.
A master of rare sensitivity and extraordinary talent, Filippino Lippi was born in Prato around 1457, from the love between the Carmelite monk Filippo Lippi and Sister Lucrezia Buti. He trained at a very young age in his father's workshop. However, at his death he came under the mentorship of Fra' Diamante and had Sandro Botticelli, who in turn had been a pupil of Filippo, as his master. In “Le Vite” (Lives) Giorgio Vasari remembers him as follows: “The fame of this gentle master remained so much in the hearts of those who had trained under him, that he was able to cover with the grace of his virtue the shame of his birth, and lived always in greatness and reputation”.
His relationship with Prato and the territory gave a decisive imprint to his life and art. During the summer of 1493, Filippino worked at the Villa Medicea in Poggio a Caiano, creating the now fragmentary fresco of the Laocoön. Shortly afterwards, he painted the famous altarpiece of the Double Intercession for the “Francescani Osservanti del Palco di Prato” (Observant branch of the Franciscan Order in Prato), now in the Alte Pinakothek of Munich. The veiled sadness that characterised the artist's work during this period - together with his antique taste, matured during his sojourns in Rome - embodies that temperament that Longhi described as the “most restless and rebellious of the last decades of the 15th century”.
