south transept Benedetto da
Maiano carved a Madonna and Child, while his brothers carved a Pieta;
but it is not such work as this which calls you to the Duomo to-day, but
certainly the Girdle itself, which, however, you can only see on certain
occasions.[135] And then there is the work of those two children, Fra
Lippo Lippi and the little girl who ran away from her convent for love
of him, Lucrezia Buti; for though it was Lippo Lippi who painted, it was
Lucrezia who served him for model, and since with him painting, for the
first time perhaps, came to need life to inspire it, Lucrezia has her
part in his work which it would be ungenerous to ignore.

Filippo Lippi was born in 1406 in a by-street of Florence called
Ardiglione, behind the convent of the Carmelites, where he painted his
first frescoes. His mother, poor soul, died in giving him life, and his
father died too before he was three years old. For some time he lived in
the care of a certain Mona Lapaccia, his aunt, who hardly brought him up
till he was eight years old, when, as Vasari tells us, no longer able to
support the burden of his maintenance, she took him to the Carmelites,
who promised to make a friar of him. Florence was at the moment of its
all too brief spring, in which painting and sculpture were to grow
almost like flowers at every street corner, with a delicate beauty that
is characteristic of wild flowers, which yet are hardy enough in
reality. Reality, it is just that which is so touching in the work of
this naive, observant painter, whose work has much of the beauty of a
folk-song, one of those rispetti which on every Tuscan hill you may hear
any summer day above the song of the cicale. He went about, like the
child he was his whole life long, looking at things out of curiosity,
and remembering them for love. His adventures, those marvellous
adventures of his childhood so carefully related by Vasari,--his capture
by pirates on the beach of Ancona, his sojourn in Barbary, his escape
hardly won by the astonishment of his art, are tales which, whether true
or not, have a real value for us because they are indicative of his
life, his view of the world: his life was in itself so daring, so
delightful an adventure, that nothing that could have happened to him
can seem marvellous beside it. For he has for the first time in Italy
seen the things we have seen, and loved them: the children at the street
corner, the flowers by the wayside, the girls grouped