Fra Lippo Lippi: Robert Browning -

Summary and Critical Analysis

Fra Lippo Lippi is the one of the most popular of Browning’s monologues. The subject,
brother Lippi, was a monk and painter of Renaissance Italy. He was one of the first
painters in the naturalist school. He is here made to voice many of Browning’s
conviction about art and its relationship to reality and the Ideal; in fact, the poem
expresses many of Browning’s ideas about life and art, ideal and reality, religion and
morality, and especially the function of art or the responsibility of the artist.

Lippo’s most important statement concerns the basis of art: should art be realistic and
true- to life, or should it be idealistic and didactic? Should art even serve religion at all?
The man is in a drunken state and is rambling along the streets at midnight, and caught
by the night guards. He gives one of the senior soldiers a long account of his childhood,
his vocation of painting and his ideas about what art and the artist must do, in the
course of the drunken talk, without the least seeming to deliver any theory at all! Lippo’s
rambling speech touches on all of these issues.

In this poem, Browning emphasizes the fact that Lippi was one of the first painters to
break with formal traditions of ecclesiastical painting which Fra Angelico and Lorenzo
Monaco followed. Lippi was the first naturalist and realist in painting, selecting by
preference contemporary scenes and figures. This was of course Browning’s view of his
own position in poetry in the nineteenth century. Certainly the artistic creed which
Browning attributes to Fra Lippo Lippi is much more his own than Lippi’s. According to
Browning, Lippi occupied an important place in the history of art as the harbinger of the
new manner of painters. Lippo contributed warm, naturalistic and full of expression, as
contrasted with the old, formal religious artists. Browning also approves Lippi’s delight in
painting the portraits of contemporaries in his work. We get the gist of Browning’s own
philosophy of life in the words of Lippi when he says: “This world’s no blot for us, / Nor
blank; it means intensely, and means good.”
 “Fra Lippo Lippi” is a very lively, amusing and entertaining poem. In spite of the
restraints imposed on his freedom of movement and the compulsion to paint saints,
Lippi remains cheerful and throughout the poem, speaks in a carefree and almost gay in
vein. His zest for life is unbounded. Though a monk, he speaks like a man of the world
and is fond of the pleasures that life has to offer and he justifies his defiance of the
conventional theory of art with its emphasis on ecclesiastical themes in the following
interesting lines:”You should not take a fellow eight years old/ And make him swear to
never kiss the girls”. He is, of course, referring to the manner in which he was forced, at
a very early age, to take to the life of a monk.

This poem explains not only what Browning believed to be Lippi’s view of the purpose of
painting, but also the poet’s own beliefs about the function of poetry. Both painter and
poet have the power of imagination. The question is what the relationship should be
between the real world around them and the ideal worlds that they can imagine. His
colleagues believe that Fra Lippo Lippi’s figures are too lifelike so that by painting so
realistically the painter will cause his viewers to pay too much attention to human bodies
and thereby become distracted from their proper concern of life, their souls. Both
Browning and Fra Lippo Lippi disagree with this point of view. To them, life is the first
concern of life, be it to the artist, to the painter, or to anyone who needs to appreciate
what the good God has given him. Fra Lippo Lippi argues that beauty does not diminish
piety. In lines 217 to 221, he explains that by responding to the beauty of God’s
creation, human beings are led to thank God and thinks to be aware of the soul within
themselves. Though he admits that he sometimes wonders whether he or the Church is
right, but when he paints, he insists, he always remembers the God of Genesis, creating
Eve in the Garden of Eden. That flesh that was made by God cannot be evil. Realistic
paintings actually draw the attention of human beings to real life beauty that they might
otherwise ignore. In this way, too, the artist causes human beings to praise their creator.
The central theme of “Fra Lippo Lippi” then, is that the function of art and poetry, which
should deal with real life and its beauty, for that, is its prime function, if not the only
function.