Panel from a Triptych: St. Anthony Abbot (1458): Art, History and Details

Panel from a Triptych: St. Anthony Abbot (1458) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Fra Filippo Lippi (Italian, c. 1406–1469).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

These panels depicting Saints Anthony the Abbot and Michael originally flanked a central scene of the Madonna and Child with Angels, now lost, to form a triptych. Giovanni di Cosimo de’Medici of Florence commissioned the ensemble in 1457 as a gift to Alfonso V of Aragon. Fra Filippo Lippi, a Carmelite friar and one of the great masters of early Renaissance Florence, depicted realistic, weighty figures in a three-dimensional space using a system of linear perspective, inspired partly by Masaccio’s Brancacci Chapel, and reflected in the background architecture. Saint Anthony the Abbot rejected all earthly possessions in pursuit of a contemplative life in the desert. He is generally regarded as the founder of monasticism and is depicted wearing a monk’s habit. Saint Michael’s sword and shield refer to his role as heaven’s defender against evil.

Object facts

• Title: Panel from a Triptych: St. Anthony Abbot
• Date: 1458
• Creator attribution: Fra Filippo Lippi (Italian, c. 1406–1469)
• Culture: Italy
• Type: Painting
• Technique: tempera on wood panel
• Dimensions: Framed: 94 x 40 x 6.5 cm (37 x 15 3/4 x 2 9/16 in.); Unframed: 81.3 x 29.8 x 3 cm (32 x 11 3/4 x 1 3/16 in.)
• Collection: MED - Medieval Art
• Department: Medieval Art
• Accession number: 1964.150.2

Collection credit

Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art/1966. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1966.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art/1969. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1969.
• Cleveland Museum of Art. Catalogue of Paintings. Pt. 1. European Paintings before 1500. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1974.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.