Lucrezia Buti
# Lucrezia Buti

Lucrezia Buti (Florence, 1435; died in the sixteenth century) was an Italian woman who became a Dominican novice and later, the lover of the painter Fra Filippo Lippi and the mother of their son and daughter. She is believed to be the model for several Madonnas featured in Lippi's paintings.

## Life

Lucrezia was born in Florence in 1435, the daughter of Caterina Ciacchi and Francesco Buti. She entered the Dominican monastery of Santa Margherita in Prato. According to the art historian, Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574), while a novice or boarder at the monastery, she met the painter Fra Filippo Lippi who in 1456 had been commissioned to create a painting for the high altar in the monastery. Lippi requested Buti as a model for the Virgin in the painting.

Lippi fell in love with Buti during her sittings for the painting and caused a great scandal by kidnapping her from a procession of the Girdle of Thomas in Prato and he took her to his nearby home. Despite attempts to force her to return to the monastery, Buti remained at Lippi's house at the piazza del Duomo.

In 1457, Buti bore their son, Filippino, and in 1465 their daughter, Alessandra. Through the intervention of Cosimo de' Medici, the couple received a dispensation to marry from Pius II. In his biography of Fra Filippo Lippi that was written in the next century, Vasari states that they never married.

Their son became a talented artist and was among the students of Fra Filippo Lippi along with Sandro Botticelli and Francesco di Pesello (called Pesellino), who were among his most distinguished pupils.

Lucrezia is thought to be the model for Lippi's Madonna and Child, and for Salome in his fresco series of the Stories of St. Stephen and St. John the Baptist in the cathedral of Prato.

