Filippo Scannabecchi

Filippo Scannabecchi

[DALMASIO; LIPPO DI DALMASIO; LIPPO DALLE MADONNE; MURATORI(?)].

Bolognese painter, born about 1360; died about 1410. Of his life and career we know exceedingly little. Malvasia gives few details, but regards his work as of the highest importance, and says that no great family in Bologna was without an example of it. It is not easy at the present day to know upon what basis Malvasia wrote, because there is no work of Scannabecchi which seems to modern critics to deserve such praise. He was, however, one of the earliest painters of Bologna, and one of the first to reveal beauty in the features of the Madonna and Child. His father, Dalmasio Scannabecchi, who painted in the same city, trained him, and also Vitale da Bologna. We have no definite dates concerning him, save that he made his will in 1410. The name Muratori, by which one or two writers have styled him, really belongs to another artist of the name of Scannabecchi, a woman, Teresa, a seventeenth-century painter, and should not be applied to him. His name of Lippo Dalle Madonne was given him because he usually painted the Madonna.

There is a reference to him in Le Pubbliche Pitture di Piacenza (Piacenza, 1780); MALVASIA, Felsina Pittrice (Bologna, 1678); the unpublished memoirs of ORETTI in the Bologna Museum.

GEORGE CHARLES WILLIAMSON