The Funeral of Saint Stephen (c. 1460): Art, History and Details

The Funeral of Saint Stephen (c. 1460) 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:

Since frescoes in 15th-century Italy often presented complex narratives, details of storytelling had to be carefully worked out before beginning to paint on wet plaster. Here Fra (Father) Filippo Lippi made a preliminary plan for a composition depicting the funeral of Saint Stephen, part of his fresco cycle on the lives of Saints Stephen and John the Baptist in the cathedral of Prato. His use of the free-flowing but permanent medium of ink allows us to see today the areas where he changed his mind—such as the placement of Stephen’s head and the figure at the altar.

Object facts

• Title: The Funeral of Saint Stephen
• Date: c. 1460
• Creator attribution: Fra Filippo Lippi (Italian, c. 1406–1469)
• Culture: Italy, Florence
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: pen and brown ink with brush and brown wash with traces of stylus over traces of black chalk
• Dimensions: Sheet: 24.9 x 19.3 cm (9 13/16 x 7 5/8 in.); Secondary Support: 24.9 x 19.3 cm (9 13/16 x 7 5/8 in.)
• Collection: DR - Italian
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 1947.70

Collection credit

John L. Severance Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Francis, Henry. "A Fifteenth Century Drawing." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 35, no. 2 (February 1948): 15-18. Attributed to Domenico Ghirlandaio
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. The Cleveland Museum of Art Handbook. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1958.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art/1966. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1966.

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.