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The frescoes in the Carafa Chapel of the Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome give full measure to Filippino Lippi's gifts as well as to an elaboration of his style. This work announces the onset of Filipino's middle period, which is even more imaginative, bizarre, and anecdotal than his early phase.
The frescoes, finished in 1493, display the artist's new visual experiences, including an awareness of Melozzo da Forli's art. Analogous daring foreshortenings are found in Lippi's Assumption for the massive altar wall of the chapel. Filippino's music-making angels are skillfully incorporated into the curve of the wall, and their joyful celebration is appropriate to the occasion. There is no single point of sight for these images; some are seen sharply from below, others are nearly perpendicular to the surface plane. As a result, an implication of celestial movement into space is first established and then denied. The angels have sweeping, agitated draperies that indicate movement, but emphasis is placed on the edges of forms so that they appear flat and linear rather than three-dimensional. Although the limbs of the figures are monumentalised to some extent, the total impression remains decidedly lyric. Mary, standing on a cloud bank, is heavily draped, and the presumed weight-free left leg emerges beneath the swells of the garment, in a shift from the normal gravitational logic.
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