The artist was Masaccio. In his art, "Biblical characters suddenly seemed real people..lit by the sun...moving in the real world, convulsed by real emotions.' Jeffrey Ruda: " Masaccio's work was profoundly important for Filippo Lippi - it gave him a profoundly new way to think about representation, about showing figures, using light and shadow to bring out a sense of shape and presence and to give the figures placement in a world that was grounded in gravity." "Lippi's earliest surviving work shows the influence of Masaccio's bold sculptural figures, transformed by a grace and delicacy that were Lippis own." By the age of 30 Filippo Lippi had left the convent and begun to earn a living as a professional artist though he remained a friar. As the years passed, his growing fame drew him inexorably into the circle of the city's leading artistic patron, the de facto ruler of Florence, the man who would commission The Adoration, Cosimo de Medici. At first Cosimo paid Lippi to produce pleasing religious scenes for his new home. Lippi had, all the while , the reputation of a man who liked to live life to the full - but in the late 1450s real scandal broke, and Lippi embroiled in a Nativity all of his own. For three years he had been working in the small town of Prato, near Florence, painting a huge fresco cycle in the Cathedral – also conducting a daily Mass – in the local nunnery. The story goes that he persuaded the abbess to let a young nun he liked - Lucrezia Buti - sit for him - and then she and Lippi absconded together. Just 20 at the time, Buti's seduction by the 50 year old friar threw Prato into an uproar. A son Filippino Lippi, later a famous painter himself, duly arrived. Cosimo however, smoothed over any scandal and Lippi returned to Florence to create Cosimo's groundbreaking Nativity.

It is likely that the patron and the artist discussed the plan for the altarpiece carefully – it would need to reflect and deepen Cosimo's penitent mood. The painting was a defining example of a new genre in art – The Adoration – which focuses intensely on Mary and the Infant Christ, and for this Lippi drew upon the teachings of a medieval saint, Bridget of Sweden, who in visions had seen exactly how Christ had entered the world. "This wasn't God floating amid the cumuli, this was God made man, put amongst the rocks, the very stuff of which our world was made."[3]
And instead of shepherds and wise men, Lippi introduced two humbly dressed saints, fitting role models for the wealthy patron. John the Baptist, said to have left home at the age of 7 to lead an austere life in the desert, here wears his traditional hair-shirt and carries a scroll that proclaims in Latin, Behold the Lamb of God. Above him, kneeling behind a natural prayer-stool of rock, is a monk, Bernard of Clairvaux, the founder of the Cistercian Order – a monk who had a particular devotion to the Virgin Mary, – here he faces her, lost in meditation. The two saints are not the only unexpected presence - few, if any, previous Nativities had included the entire Holy Trinity - God the Father, His Son, and the dove of the Holy Spirit. It was a subject dear to Cosimo, after he helped to resolve a theological dispute about the nature of the Trinity and is depicted here wreathed together in rays of celestial light. But the painting also has a darker side. All round the new-born Christ child wild flowers grow, their delicacy concealing a sombre meaning - their five petals represent the Five wounds Jesus will receive during his Crucifixion. Such symbols abound – on the ground a goldfinch rests – the bird that feeds on the seeds of the thorn bush, calling to mind the Crown of Thorns. Further, there is the unsettling landscape, not a stable or open rolling countryside, rather, immersed in a dark dense forest - "this was Lippi's innovation and Cosimo's obsession." Lippi chose an unusually specific landscape - it is the high woods at Camaldoli, east of Florence, where in the 11th century Romuald had founded a monastery, to which the Medici were very devoted. The Medici would have recognised at once the landscape, resonant with the austere and ascetical spirit of one of the great monastic orders, the Camaldolite Order. Camaldoli had another specific link to the painting: the monks there ran a timber business, chopping down the tall pines of the forest to provide wood for the buildings of Florence. These fallen trees are strewn through the painting and would have reminded Cosimo of the Biblical words of John the Baptist (Gospel of Matthew, chapter 3) :Now the axe is laid unto the root of the trees, and in the end, every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire - a clear evocation of the Last Judgment, of the end of time. "Cosimo is a tall tree..."
Lippi painted using tempera, coloured pigments bound in egg-yolk, the standard medium of the day. This, " has to be applied very gently, very delicately, little parallel strokes, literally stroking paint on to the surface. A great master like Lippi would have created seamless transitions which are barely visible now..He must have had wonderfully fine brushes, I don't know how many he got through each day, wearing them out." Lippi knew that his painting was to be displayed in a very particular environment , the windowless chapel of the Medici palace, so it would be seen only by candlelight. A small part of Mary's cloak bears traces of damage from the naked flame of an altar candle. Lippi used the darkness, and finished the painting with a breathtaking display of gold. His use of gold was both , "very extravagant and virtuoso, but also very restrained..halos with their incised and punched decorations..and sometimes he's not even using gold, he's using little dots of yellow and ochre to suggest the play of light across a golden surface, set next to actual gilding." For Cosimo, the banker, the gold might also have held a very personal meaning. Tim Parks: "To me , the most important part of the picture is the amount of gold that's used, this extraordinary superimposition of cash and the sacred - the darkness at the centre of the painting does nothing but set off the gold here. He wanted to make his money religiously respectable - I think that's absolutely key to the whole thing..." Unlike most artists of the day Lippi chose to sign his picture, on the handle of the axe, 'with panache, in a virtuoso display of foreshortening.' By the year 1459 Lippi's work was finished, and the painting placed above Cosimo's private altar. Four years later, Cosimo died. Lippi's fame continued to grow - he fathered another child with Lucrezia and the Pope offered to release the couple from Holy Orders so that they could be married - Lippi declined. A decade after finishing his Adoration Fra Filippo Lippi died. Lippi's inspiration continued - the young Sandro Botticelli, once Filippo Lippi's pupil, adopted his style and Michelangelo praised him. Soon his Adoration had become one of the most copied paintings of the 15th century, an image in demand for the houses of the rich and poor alike. Yet its fame did not mean it was secure in its home, and it faced threats from rebellion and war.