entered a caveat. In order to adjust matters the Lippe government moved the Bundesrat, on the 5th of July 1895, to pass an imperial law declaring the Reichsgericht (the supreme tribunal of the empire) a competent court to adjudicate upon the claims of the rival lines to the succession. In consequence the Bundesrat passed a resolution on the 1st of February 1896, requesting the chancellor of the empire to bring about a compromise for the appointment of a court of arbitration between the parties. Owing to the mediation of the chancellor a compact was on the 3rd of July 1896 concluded between the heads of the three collateral lines of the whole house of Lippe, binding “both on themselves and on the lines of which they were the heads.” By clause 2 of this compact, a court of arbitration was to be appointed, consisting of the king of Saxony and six members selected by him from among the members of the supreme court of law of the empire. This court was duly constituted, and on the 22nd of June 1897 delivered judgment to the effect that Count Ernest of Lippe-Biesterfeld, head of the line of Lippe-Biesterfeld, was entitled to succeed to the throne of Lippe on the death of Prince Alexander. In consequence of this judgment Prince Adolph resigned the regency and Count Ernest became regent in his stead. On the 26th of September 1904 Count Ernest died and his eldest son, Count Leopold, succeeded to the regency; but the question of the succession was again raised by the prince of Schaumburg-Lippe, who urged that the marriage of Count William Ernest, father of Count Ernest, with Modeste von Unruh, and that of the count regent Ernest himself with Countess Carline von Wartensleben were not ebenbürtig (equal birth), and that the issue of these marriages were therefore excluded from the succession. Prince George of Schaumburg-Lippe and the count regent, Leopold, thereupon entered into a compact, again referring the matter to the Bundesrat, which requested the chancellor of the empire to agree to the appointment of a court of arbitration consisting of two civil senates of the supreme court, sitting at Leipzig, to decide finally the matter in dispute. It was further provided in the compact that Leopold should remain as regent, even after the death of Alexander, until the decision of the court had been given. Prince Alexander died on the 13th of January 1905; Count Leopold remained as regent, and on the 25th of October the court of arbitration issued its award, declaring the marriages in question (which were, as proved by document, contracted with the consent of the head of the house in each case) ebenbürtig, and that in pursuance of the award of the king of Saxony the family of Lippe-Biesterfeld, together with the collateral lines sprung from Count William Ernest (father of the regent, Count Ernest) were in the order of nearest agnates called to the succession. Leopold (b. 1871) thus became prince of Lippe.
See A. Falkmann, Beiträge zur Geschichte des Fürstenthums Lippe (Detmold, 1857–1892; 6 vols.); Schwanold, Das Fürstentum Lippe, das Land und seine Bewohner (Detmold, 1899); Piderit, Die lippischen Edelherrn im Mittelalter (Detmold, 1876); A. Falkmann and O. Preuss, Lippische Regenten (Detmold, 1860–1868); H. Triepel, Der Streit um die Thronfolge im Fürstentum Lippe (Leipzig, 1903); and P. Laband, Die Thronfolge im Fürstentum Lippe (Freiburg, 1891); and Schiedsspruch in dem Rechtstreit über die Thronfolge im Fürstentum Lippe vom 25 Okt. 1905 (Leipzig, 1906).
LIPPI, the name of three celebrated Italian painters.
I. Fra Filippo Lippi (1406–1469), commonly called Lippo Lippi, one of the most renowned painters of the Italian quattrocento, was born in Florence—his father, Tommaso, being a butcher. His mother died in his childhood, and his father survived his wife only two years. His aunt, a poor woman named Monna Lapaccia, then took charge of the boy; and in 1420, when fourteen years of age, he was registered in the community of the Carmelite friars of the Carmine in Florence. Here he remained till 1432, and his early faculty for fine arts was probably developed by studying the works of Masaccio in the neighbouring chapel of the Brancacci. Between 1430 and 1432 he executed some works in the monastery, which were destroyed by a fire in 1771; they are specified by Vasari, and one of them was particularly marked by its resemblance to Masaccio’s style. Eventually Fra Filippo quitted his convent, but it appears that he was not relieved from some sort of religious vow; in a letter dated in 1439 he speaks of himself as the poorest friar of Florence, and says he is charged with the maintenance of six marriageable nieces. In 1452 he was appointed chaplain to the convent of S. Giovannino in Florence, and in 1457 rector (Rettore Commendatario) of S. Quirico at Legania, and his gains were considerable and uncommonly large from time to time; but his poverty seems to have been chronic, the money being spent, according to one account, in frequently recurring amours.
Vasari relates some curious and romantic adventures of Fra Filippo, which modern biographers are not inclined to believe. Except through Vasari, nothing is known of his visits to Ancona and Naples, and his intermediate capture by Barbary pirates and enslavement in Barbary, whence his skill in portrait-sketching availed to release him. This relates to a period, 1431–1437, when his career is not otherwise clearly accounted for. The doubts thrown upon his semi-marital relations with a Florentine lady appear, however, to be somewhat arbitrary; Vasari’s account is circumstantial, and in itself not greatly improbable. Towards June 1456 Fra Filippo was settled in Prato (near Florence) for the purpose of fulfilling a commission to paint frescoes in the choir of the cathedral. Before actually undertaking this work he set about painting, in 1458, a picture for the convent chapel of S. Margherita of Prato, and there saw Lucrezia Buti, the beautiful daughter of a Florentine, Francesco Buti; she was either a novice or a young lady placed under the nuns’ guardianship. Lippi asked that she might be permitted to sit to him for the figure of the Madonna (or it might rather appear of S. Margherita); he made passionate love to her, abducted her to his own house, and kept her there spite of the utmost efforts the nuns could make to reclaim her. The fruit of their loves was a boy, who became the painter, not less celebrated than his father, Filippino Lippi (noticed below). Such is substantially Vasari’s narrative, published less than a century after the alleged events; it is not refuted by saying, more than three centuries later, that perhaps Lippo had nothing to do with any such Lucrezia, and perhaps Lippino was his adopted son, or only an ordinary relative and scholar. The argument that two reputed portraits of Lucrezia in paintings by Lippo are not alike, one as a Madonna in a very fine picture in the Pitti gallery, and the other in the same character in a Nativity in the Louvre, comes to very little; and it is reduced to nothing when the disputant adds that the Louvre painting is probably not done by Lippi at all. Besides, it appears more likely that not the Madonna in the Louvre but a S. Margaret in a picture now in the Gallery of Prato is the original portrait (according to the tradition) of Lucrezia Buti.
The frescoes in the choir of Prato cathedral, being the stories of the Baptist and of St Stephen, represented on the two opposite wall spaces, are the most important and monumental works which Fra Filippo has left, more especially the figure of Salome dancing, and the last of the series, showing the ceremonial mourning over Stephen’s corpse. This contains a portrait of the painter, but which is the proper figure is a question that has raised some diversity of opinion. At the end wall of the choir are S. Giovanni Gualberto and S. Alberto, and on the ceiling the four evangelists.
The close of Lippi’s life was spent at Spoleto, where he had been commissioned to paint, for the apse of the cathedral, some scenes from the life of the Virgin. In the semidome of the apse is Christ crowning the Madonna, with angels, sibyls and prophets. This series, which is not wholly equal to the one at Prato, was completed by Fra Diamante after Lippi’s death. That Lippi died in Spoleto, on or about the 8th of October 1469, is an undoubted fact; the mode of his death is again a matter of dispute. It has been said that the pope granted Lippi a dispensation for marrying Lucrezia, but that, before the permission arrived, he had been poisoned by the indignant relatives either of Lucrezia herself, or of some lady who had replaced her in the inconstant painter’s affections. This is now generally regarded as a fable; and indeed a vendetta upon a man aged sixty-three for a
