The originality of Filippino Lippi’s altarpiece of The Virgin and Child with Saint Jerome and Saint Dominic, commissioned by the Rucellai for the church of San Pancrazio and now in the National Gallery in London, has been largely overlooked. This study highlights its penitential theme, its relation to the Rucellai family and their armorial lion, and to the altarpiece’s original location next to the Chapel of the Holy Sepulchre, commissioned by Giovanni Rucellai. Although the Holy Sepulchre bears the date 1467, the two chapels were both consecrated in 1485, the year that Filippino’s panel was most probably installed. Turning to the two saints who kneel on either side of the Madonna suckling the Child, we trace the close alliance between the Hieronymites and the Dominicans in fifteenth-century Florence, notably at Fiesole, and note how contemporary penitential practices informed Filippino’s depiction. Whereas Jerome performs an active meditatio Christi, Dominic, in complementary fashion, emulates the contemplative Virgin Mary.

Filippino, himself a devout member of a penitential confraternity, brought a very personal commitment and ambition to the Rucellai commission. Distancing himself from his former master, Botticelli, in his Florentine altarpieces of the mid-1480s, Lippi bid to inherit the mantle of Leonardo. His precocious response to Leonardo’s unfinished Adoration of the Magi for San Donato a Scopeto may well have been aided and abetted by his friend Piero del Pugliese, who commissioned Lippi to paint the Vision of Saint Bernard for a church within the parish of San Donato.

Filippino’s choice of colour is purposeful. Within the predominantly sombre tonality that accords with the penitential theme of the altarpiece, he selected an unusual ruby-red for the Virgin’s robe in allusion to the oricello or orchil dye from which the Rucellai woollen merchants derived their family name. By painting the spine of Dominic’s book the same ruby-red as the Virgin’s robe, Lippi underlined the saint’s emulation of Mary. The inky darkness of Jerome’s cave in the main panel adumbrates the tonality of the predella in which the figures of Saint Francis, Joseph of Arimathea, the Dead Christ and Mary Magdalen isolated against black fields suggest a descent from light into darkness comparable to the dimly lit interior of the Holy Sepulchre in the adjacent chapel.