Gentile da Fabriano and Fra Lippo Lippi

Fabriano

The illumination added to page 79v is copied from Gentile da Fabriano’s Adoration of the Magi, a 1423 Florentine painting.¹⁶ The Fisher Illuminator likely saw this piece in the Santa Trinita church where it was displayed as an altarpiece after its commission.¹⁷

In both the original and copy, the Virgin Mary sits outside of a building structure, dressed in a blue robe and bearing a halo. Jesus sits in her lap, arms outstretched, naked apart from a cloth. Even in this small corner, Fabriano’s original is incredibly busy, but in the Fisher reproduction no other figures are included and the artist has opted for a lightly patterned blue background for the sky, adding grass on the earth and a diamond pattern on the ledge upon which Mary sits. The composition of Mary, Jesus, and the building behind them and the position of Mary’s body, particularly her hands, is almost identical in both.

Lippi

The illumination on page 69r comes from Fra Filippo Lippi’s Adoration in the Forest (also referred to as Adoration of the Christ Child), a 1459 painting originally held in the Medici Palace Chapel, where the Fisher Illuminator could have seen it.¹⁸

In both, the Virgin Mary kneels facing to the viewer’s left, her hands clasped in prayer in front of her heart. She wears a red gown with a blue robe overtop, and a white cloth and halo adorn her head. In Lippi’s painting, she is in the woods praying to Jesus, surrounded by saints and forest imagery. In the Fisher reproduction, she is isolated on a black and white checkered floor with a red and gold pattern behind her. The Fisher Illuminator has kept the forest motif, with trees and fronds in front of the blue sky above her. Her positioning and the inclusion of forest imagery make Lippi’s Adoration in the Forest a very likely source of the Fisher reproduction.