Filippo Lippi was born into a very large and poor family in Florence. After the death of both his father and mother, the young Filippo was raised by an aunt for some years; later, she placed him with his brother in the Convent of Carmelite monks at Santa Maria del Carmine. The Brancacci chapel of the monastery was at that time being decorated with frescoes by Masaccio. These frescoes, which were to be among the most glorious and influential paintings of the Renaissance, were Lippi's first important contact with art.

In 1432 Lippi left the monastery after having painted some frescoes in the church and in the cloister. According to the Renaissance biographer Giorgio Vasari (Vasari, Giorgio), who wrote a lively and fanciful profile of the painter, Lippi was abducted with some companions by the Moors on the Adriatic, held as a slave for 18 months, and then freed after he painted a portrait of his owner. It is known that in 1434 the artist was at Padua. None of the works executed while he was at Padua are known, but the effect of his presence may be recognized in the paintings of others there, such as Andrea Mantegna (Mantegna, Andrea).

In 1437 Lippi returned to Florence, protected by the powerful Medici Family, and was commissioned to execute several works for convents and churches. The qualities he acquired during his years of travel are affirmed with clarity in two works of 1437, immediately after he returned from Padua: The Virgin and Child Between SS. Frediano and Augustin and the Madonna and Child. In both of these altarpieces (altarpiece), the influence of Masaccio is still evident, but it is absorbed into a different style, having the pictorial effect of bas-relief, rendered more evident by lines, so that it resembles the reliefs of the sculptors Donatello and Jacopo Della Quercia. In these works, the colour is warm, toned down with shadings, approaching the limpid chromatics of his great contemporary Fra Angelico. Still further testimony to Lippi's development is the Annunciation, once believed to be a late work but now dated between 1441 and 1443. It is composed in a new way, using the newly discovered effects of perspective and skillful contrasts between colour and form; the suggested movement of the light garments of the two frightened girls at the door is rendered with such sensitivity as to anticipate Sandro Botticelli (Botticelli, Sandro).

A famous altarpiece of the same time, Lippi's well-known Coronation of the Virgin, is a complex work crowded with figures. The celebrated altarpiece is exquisitely sumptuous in appearance and marks a historic point in Florentine painting in its success in uniting as one scene the various panels of a polyptych.

The altarpieces are characterized by a solemnity of composition that is absent from the paintings in which he developed a typical motif of 15th-century Florentine art: the Madonna with the Child at her breast. The masterpiece of these is Madonna with Child and Scenes from the Life of Mary, a circular painting now in the Pitti Palace in Florence; it is a clear and realistic mirror of life, transfigured in a most intimate way, and it had a great effect on Renaissance art.

A second Coronation of the Virgin, executed about 1445, displays a marked change in the style of Lippi—from the plastic values suggested by his study of Masaccio to the serene chromatics of Angelico.

In 1467 Lippi, his son Filippino, and Fra Diamante left for Spoleto, where Lippi had received a commission for another vast undertaking: the decorations and frescoes of the choir of the cathedral, which included the Nativity, the Annunciation, the Death of Mary, and—in the centre of the vault of the apse—the Coronation. These frescoes were Lippi's final work; they were interrupted by his death, for which there are two documented dates—in the monks' necrology of Santa Maria del Carmine in Florence and in the archives of Spoleto. Later the Medici had a splendid sepulchre, designed by Lippi's son, erected for him (1490) in the cathedral of Spoleto.

Posthumous judgments of Filippo Lippi were often coloured by the traditions of his adventurous life. Moreover, his works have been criticized from time to time for their borrowings from other painters; nevertheless, it has also been recognized that his art was not diminished but rather enriched and rendered more balanced by what he took from Masaccio and Fra Angelico. He was constantly seeking the techniques to realize his artistic vision and the new ideas that made him one of the most appreciated artists of his time.

The 20th-century critic Bernard Berenson (Berenson, Bernard), who maintained that Lippi's true place as an artist was among the “painters of genius,” also described him as “a high-class illustrator,” intending by this to underline the importance of expressive content and the presentation of reality in his works. Later critics have recognized in Lippi a “narrative” spirit that reflected the life of his time and translated into everyday terms the ideals of the early Renaissance.