St. Anthony Abbot
1458
St. Anthony Abbot kneels in a field of delicate white flowers, his heavy lavender robes pooling around him like sculpted stone. He clutches a T-shaped staff, a symbol of his faith, while a golden halo glows against the bright red building behind him. The artist, Filippo Lippi, was a Carmelite friar himself, which adds a layer of irony to this portrait of the ultimate holy hermit. Lippi was famously terrible at monastic life—he eventually ran off with a nun, Lucrezia Buti, to start a family, proving that even the painters of saints had their very human moments.
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