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Santo Stefano Cathedral piazza del Duomo, Prato, Tuscany, Italy. It is the last year opportunity to visit the restoration worksite for Filippo Lippi's frescoes. Closing date 31-12-2006. Inside the central chapel of the cathedral of Prato are frescoes by Filippo Lippi showing scenes from the lives of St. Stephen and St. John the Baptist painted between 1452 and 1465. Filippo Lippi`s frescoes represent, without a doubt, the highest point of the production of the Florentine artist, for the complexity and quality of the paintings.

After receiving his training at the Carmine convent where he lived as a monk and experimented with the new techniques developed by Masaccio in the Brancacci Chapel, Lippi re-elaborated the plasticism and naturalism of his master, mediating them with elements of style learned from Donatello, to achieve his own personal form of expression, characterized by the supple extension of line, by the 'grandiloquence' of his style and his free use of spatial arrangement. We see this very clearly in his frescoes in Prato, indeed his celebrated Dance of Salomè has become a compendium of an ideal Renaissance Florence from the point of view of the content, and of the subtlety and pictorial refinement that are a prelude to the work of Botticelli, in terms of the form. The restoration of these paintings, planned and entirely financed by the Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities, through the Board of Supervision of the Architectural and Artistic Treasures of Florence, Pistoia and Prato, started in the spring of 2001 with the preparation of the worksite and preliminary operations: studies of the artistic technique used, the state of conservation, the causes of the deterioration of the frescoes. This will be followed by the actual restoration, which will take several years. Guided Visits art, only by request.

Booking is required.

Entrance fee: € 8,00 per person. Visits last approximately one hour and will be held in Italian. English and German spoken only on request and for group bookings. No more than 12 people at a time will be admitted onto the scaffoldings.

For more information visit

• http://www.restaurofilippolippi.it/default.htm