I love Wikipedia where I found the history of Filippo Lippi and Lucreazia! “He was born in Florence to Tommaso, a butcher, and his wife. If his birth name was different, it is no longer recorded. Both his parents died when he was still a child. Mona Lapaccia, his aunt, then took charge of the boy. In 1420 he was admitted to the community of Carmelite friars of the Priory of Our Lady of Mount Carmel in Florence, taking religious vows in the Order the following year, at the age of sixteen. He would have been ordained a priest sometime around 1425, and was to remain in residence in that priory until 1432.[1] In his Lives of the Artists, Vasari says: “Instead of studying, he spent all his time scrawling pictures on his own books and those of others.” The prior decided to give him the opportunity to learn painting.

In 1458, while engaged in this work, he set about painting a picture for the monastery chapel of S. Margherita in that city, where he met Lucrezia Buti, the beautiful daughter of a Florentine named Francesco Buti; she was either a novice of the Order or a young lady placed under the nuns’ guardianship. Lippi asked that she might be permitted to sit for the figure of the Madonna (or perhaps S. Margherita). The completion of the work took fourteen years, with lates, pauses and scandals, such as that involving the painter (also a professed Carmelite friar and ordained priest and a nun from the monastery of Santa Margherita, where Lippi had been chaplain from 1456 to the issue of a tamburazione (secret accusation) in May 1461.

Lucrezia Buti and Filippo fallen in love after she was acting as his model for some paintings. He abducted her to his own house, and kept her there despite the nuns’ efforts to reclaim her. The result was their son Filippino Lippi and daughter Alessandra. Filippino became a painter no less famous than his father. His paintings are just amazing! Filippo was a favorite painter of the Medici’s and his name and their love story came to the Pope knowledge who gave them the permission to get married but before the document arrived, Filippo was found dead poisoned by another woman. Some say he had many lovers but Lucreazia owned his heart!

The frescoes in the choir of the cathedral of Prato, which depict the stories of St. John the Baptist and St. Stephen on the two main facing walls, are considered Fra Filippo's most important and monumental works, particularly the figure of Salome dancing, which has clear affinities with later works by Sandro Botticelli, his pupil, and Filippino Lippi, his son, as well as the scene showing the ceremonial mourning over Stephen's corpse.
<b

The quality of his work is remarkable…his son Filippino carried it through with some of his apprentices of his time.