“La forza della virtù”: Vasari on Skill and Holiness in the Lives of Fra Angelico and Filippo Lippi

IN VICTIMS AND VILLAINS IN VASARI ’S LIVES , Andrew Ladis calls attention to the ways in which theVite of 1568 establishes a point-counterpoint of heroes and antiheroes that generates the narrative’s moral tension and literary energy: “Joined by common citizenship,” artists in this work “participate in a great morality play in which sacred virtues, such as humility, charity, and faith, vie against the base motives that perpetually threaten Vasari’s sacred brotherhood.” Among the many protagonists of this sweeping drama, Ladis reads Fra Angelico and Fra Filippo Lippi as each other’s foil. This seems an appropriate pairing, given the proximity of the two lives in Vasari’s oeuvre (only five vite apart from each other), the fact that both artists were friars, and the stark contrast in how they lived out their monastic vows. Opposite the angelic Fra Giovanni da Fiesole, for whom “virtue is an article of craft as well as faith,” Ladis places the undisciplined and dissolute Lippi, who used the nun with whom he would elope and conceive a child as his model for a painting of the Madonna. Fra Angelico, in Ladis’s reading, is hero to Lippi’s antihero, onemore positive exemplum in a sequence of edifying contrasts that shape Vasari’s history of the rebirth of art in Italy.