Introduction
Throughout history the art of painting and the art of poetry have been developing next to one other in a close relationship. It can be argued that a painter and a poet have much in common in terms of creating art. Both are creating images representing ideas, emotions or personal expression of thoughts and opinions. They use similar devices. A painter uses a brush to convey their message on canvas in the form of a visual image, as well as a poet uses a pen or voice to form words which will produce a literary text.
The interaction between poetry and the visual art has a long history. In almost every culture poetry has reacted to the visual arts, and the visual arts have a long history. There are many ways that poetry can interact with the visual arts. The aim of this dissertation is to examine the work of three artists with reference to eighteenth century concerns surrounding art.
The study shows how much each of these two forms of artistic expression translates into the other medium, how they share each other’s features and how each of those forms can imitate the other. The dissertation does not assume that visual and verbal expressions are identical. Rather, they are comparable in structural, semantic and semiotic function.
Tennyson, Browning or Rosetti work of art represent a relevant example of the theory of ut pictura poesis and the theme of the interconnection between the visual arts and poetry in general. Creating an image and produce the written counterpart of it consequently or producing a picture based on a previously composed poem is concrete application of ut pictura poesis.
The main goal of my thesis is to provide an overview work demonstrating the relationship between the textual and visual arts based on the example of the Pre-Raphaelites and supported by the theory of ut pictura poesis. I want to point out the interconnection of literature (poetry) and visual arts analysing the chosen examples and observe to what extent the Pre-Raphaelites succeeded in following the ut pictura poesis concept. There are three different points of view that are examined. Firstly the double role of an artist as in the case of Dante Gabriel Rossetti; then the influence of poetry on painting and as the last the influence of painting on poetry.
Chapter 1
ART AND POETRY
1.1 The Victorian poetry debate
The word ‘Victorian’, is a term which often “loses any claim to specificity” (Bristow 2). When looking for a definition of the word ‘Victorian’, one cannot but acknowledge that it is inextricably linked to the reign of Queen Victoria. The Online Cambridge Dictionary, for instance, merely defines the term as “belonging to, made in, or living in the time when Queen Victoria was queen of the UK (1837–1901)”. The term ‘Victorian’ is becoming merely a marker for a historical period, without any socio-cultural connotations.
In: Victorian Poetry, Poetics and Politics (1993), Isobel Armstrong claims how wrong it is to conceive of Victorian poetry as merely characterized by belonging to a certain period in history (1). According to her, Victorian poetry was born as a bridge between transitions from Romanticism to modernism (1). Indeed, when looking at history from a different perspective, one could also argue that the early Victorians were late Romantics; Joseph Bristow even classifies certain authors from the Victorian era as “Romantic Victorians” (2) In other words, the transition from Romanticism to ‘Victorianism’ did not happen overnight. However, for the Victorians themselves, the romantic period ended in an abrupt manner. With Keats, Shelley, Byron, Blake and Coleridge dying respectively in 1821, 1822, 1824, 1827 and 1834, Victoria’s crowning in 1837 was considered a turning point (Bristow 4). “Victorian poetry”, as Bristow argues, “began in a vacuum”:
After the successive deaths of the major Romantics (bar Wordsworth, who lived until 1850), the decade that opened the Victorian era boldly declared the loss of the recently pre-eminent art […]. During the 1830’s […] periodical reviewers bemoan the supposedly moribund state of English poetry, looking out all the time for new talents to express the nascent Victorian ‘spirit of the age’. (Bristow 4)
Victorian poetry can be divided in 2 main phases, an early and a late period. In the early Victorian poetry raised poets as : Alfred Tennyson (a Poet Laureate who adopted the conventional religious and social views and values of his age), Robert Browning with a higher reputation as the writer of dramatic monologue, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Gerard Manley Hopkins, who used poetry to express his dissatisfaction with the state of things. The spirit of pessimism and doubt, the spirit of desire for the lost, past and ideal and the thirst for beauty, love and art are some features of Tennysonian poetry. Tennyson was more concerned with the individual in society while Browning was concerned with the individual as an eccentric, and his verse was more abrupt and difficult to follow.
The Victorians realized that they could not be categorized as Romantics any longer (Bristow 3). In order to identify themselves, they had to abandon the values and ideas which they considered to be ‘Romantic’: the value of emotions, the notion of poetry as recreation and the focus on “the authenticity, autonomy and creativity of the poetic mind” (Bristow 2), the use of subjective, autobiographical material to express a lyrical and personal experience of life; the melancholy and sad tone; the cult of simple and primitive, rural life; the description of a wild, gloomy nature, often connected with night and darkness; the choice of cemeteries and ruins. The Victorians attempt to differentiate themselves from Romantics was not a very successful one because of the strong influences the Romantic poets have had on poets (Greenblatt 996). Romantics’ poets appeared to propagate isolation from the society while the Victorians promote the poet’s integration in community (Starzyk 110). According to Hallam and Mill, theorists of the Victorian age, the alienation was a necessary component of being an artist because the society with her negative influences was a threat to the poet’s vision (Starzyk 110).
The early poetry of both Tennyson and Browning was instilled with the spirit of romanticism but it was romanticism with distinction. Tennyson admitted the affinity with Byron and Keats and Browning with Shelly but their works no longer express an attitude of revolt against conventional modes.
Tennyson’s poems seems to be echoes of Victorian life: “For nearly half a century Tennyson was not only a man and a poet, he was a voice, the voice of a whole people expressing in exquisite melody their doubts and their faith, griefs and their triumphs. As a poet, therefore, who expresses not so much a personal as a national spirit, he is probably the most representative literary man of the Victorian era” (Long ).
Robert Browning is the only poet of that time who can be placed beside Tennyson, and it is only in respect of greatness that the two can be conjoined; for in the great features of his poetry Browning stands apart, not only from Tennyson, but from all contemporary writers.
The late Victorian poetry it is known as Pre-Raphaelite . The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood founded in 1849 was leaded by the painter poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti who tried to revive the natural values and techniques of medieval life, Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, later followed by William Morris and Algeron Charles Swinburne. The love of nature, sensuous descriptions and attention to detail, subjective psychological states are the main characteristics of their art inspired by Ruskin’s ideas.
The poetry of the Pre-Raphaelite poets was a revolt and reaction against the conventionality of poetry represented by Tennyson which concentrated on the social, religious and political life of the age.
Rossetti concentrated on the visualization of the life of The Middle Ages , to the progress of art and adoration of beauty.
In his works Rossetti celebrates feminity and women in general combining physical passion with spiritual love. As a model for the most of his paintings of drawing he captured Elizabeth Siddall, his muse and wife, whose death meant a tragic turnabout for the depressed Rossetti. He stopped writing poetry and gradually abandoned painting as well. Dante Gabriel Rossetti died of a combination of drug addiction, alcoholism and a mental disease in 1882.
John Ruskin and ut pictura poesis in the ninetheenth century
John Ruskin (1819-1900) was a British painter, writer, scientist, poet, philosopher and art critic and is consider being the most significant supporter of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
The rebirth of the link between the painting and poetry, the so-called sister arts, formed a key component of the Pre-Raphaelite project. Pre-Raphaelite painters and poets used two different ways of integrating their two arts: the complementary approach and the digressive approach. A work of art, either poetry or painting, acted as a complement to the other work or served as the point of departure for a different work. Both approaches were practicably and help us to see the evolution of Pre-Raphaelitism. They came to imitate on art by means of the other or they could create imitative works whose values did not depend on closeness to their sources.
Ut pictura poesis − "as is painting, so is poetry" − has served to pull together the visual and verbal arts. Poetry should follow painting's ability to imitate nature. By 1856 the ut pictura poesis analogy had lost much of his vitality, but John Ruskin revived them in order to formulate his own theory of the coalition of the sister arts. In volume three of Modern Painters, Ruskin identified both painting and poetry as forms of artistic expression: "Painting is properly to be opposed to speaking or writing, but not to poetry. Both painting and speaking are means of expression. Poetry is the employment of either for the noblest purposes" (qtd. in Landow 80). Painting and poetry are linked art because they both imitate reality. According to Ruskin, the connection between visual and text provides a better understanding of the artist’s intention. Ruskin describes art as expression: "Great art is produced by men who feel acutely and nobly; and it is in some sort an expression of this personal feeling"( qtd in Landow 43)
Ruskin's attempt to improve the public's perception of painting is done by analogy with poetry. He makes a favorable comparison between poetry and painting trying to put them on the same level to attract the middle classes, who were unaware of the art of painting (Landow). In Renaissance Italy, in eighteenth century England, and in the England of 1843 painting was the younger sister of poetry, trying to have a position in society.
John Ruskin’s early writings focused on the role of the paintings besides the poem. In his opinion the paintings were to be admired for their beauty while poems were to be analyzed for their didactic content. His theory ignores the effect of painting upon society.
Four principles are manifest in all his work: (1) that the object of art, as of every other human endeavor, is to find and to express the truth; (2) that art, in order to be true, must break away from conventionalities and copy nature; (3) that morality is closely allied with art, and that a careful study of any art reveals the moral strength or weakness of the people that produced it; (4) that the main purpose of art is not to delight a few cultured people but to serve the daily uses of common life. (Long)
In his later writings, Ruskin discredits the view that art is merely a form of innocent recreation, rather than an activity familiarly associated with the major preoccupation of life.
The Victorian visual imagination and an art-historical introduction
Carol T. Christ and John O. Jordan first used the term in 1995 in their book Victorian literature and the Victorian Visual Imagination and Kate Flint re-used it five years later in her book The Victorians and the Visual Imagination. Christ and Jordan explain that aesthetic theorists in nineteenth-century Britain regarded the eye as the “pre-eminent organ of truth” and that poetic theory of the nineteenth century hailed the “inward eye” and the poet's power of “painting a picture to the inward eye”, thus creating a word painting (xxii – xxiii). The painting of pictures in one’s mind’s eye is seen in the poetry of Alfred Lord Tennyson where his extensive descriptions of Nature are used to produce what Henry James called “the illusion of life” (Christ and Jordan xx).
Kate Flint‟s The Victorians and the Visual Imagination also emphasizes the role of sight in Victorian culture. Flint states that “the Victorians were fascinated with the act of seeing, with the question of reliability – or otherwise – of the human eye, and of the problems of interpreting what they saw” (1). For Flint “in each case, the act of seeing was something performed by individuals, each with their own particular subjectivities and ocular physiology” (1).
The relation between the art produced in the nineteenth century and the sociological climate is inextricably linked. Isobel Armstrong describes Victorian modernism as:
Belonging to a condition of crisis which has emerged directly from economic and cultural change. In fact, Victorian poetics begins to conceptualize the idea of culture as a category and includes itself within the definition… [T]o be „new‟ or „modern‟…was to confront and self-consciously to conceptualize as new elements that are still perceived as the constitutive forms of our own conditions (Poetry, Poetics and Politics 8).
This condition of crisis in society defined the new modern era in England. The concept of the “Victorian visual imagination” acts as a broad umbrella term that encompasses Victorian sentimentalism and what Edward Berry Burgum in 1928 called “Victorianism”. Burgum described “Victorianism” as epitomizing the sentimentalism so transparently seen in the art and literature of the period, and regarded this as a result of the industrial revolution. Burgum discusses the consequences of the industrial revolution with regards to the shifting of classes at the time. The nineteenth century, he says:
“brought into social prominence and political control a new class, whose prosperity was recent and came from ownership not of land but of factories…Afterwards, persons chiefly of this class took advantage of the centralization of industry in their towns and became prosperous within a generation through the cheap and rapid production of goods by machine instead of hand labor. Within less than a century their numbers had bloated into bourgeoisie, and they faced the task of reconciling old habits to new circumstances” (Burgum 273-291).
The visual imagination, then, in nineteenth-century British literature and art represented a movement away from industrialization into the sentimental, nostalgic and romanticized.
The prominence of visual detail in Victorian poetry reflects the importance on the accounts of perception. Both objective and subjective accounts of perception in Victorian poetics anchor themselves in the visual. Ruskin’s conviction was that the poet’s responsibility is to provide a true account of the appearances of things.
At mid-century,Tennyson and Browning had evolved a distinct poetics from their Romantic roots: representation of a singular subjectivity in a dramatic context that allows ironic distance and implication; use of visual detail to mediate between subjective and objective ideas of perception; experiments with perspectivism to generate large poetic forms with ambition of social and philosophical statement; and an embrace of elaboration Ruskin’s assertion that accurate, honest visual representation would be sufficient to penetrate nature’s ‘meaning’, in style.
Visual, Painting and Poetry
The shift from visibility to visuality makes it easy to understand the way the British culture redefine itself during the 1800. Lindsay Smith’s Victorian Photography, Painting and Poetry (1995) explicitly consider how such technologies may have shaped the kind of visual perceptions relayed by Victorian poetry. The collection Victorian Literature and the Victorian Visual Imagination (1995), edited by Christ and John O. Jordan, and Kate Flint’s more recent The Victorians and the Visual Imagination (2000) examine a variety of relationships between literary texts and different kinds of spectacle, illustration or visual technology.
Visuality, as defined by Nancy Armstrong, is a way of thinking about a composition – painting, poem – from a detached point of view. Visual data are objectified, symbolic. Poetry extended the reader’s own imagination while the paintings, visual images, are invested with meaning and can have different functions. Images are able to convey messages more successfully than can words.
In a lecture at Indiana State University on 14 April 1995, Armstrong point that the written word was the primary means by which people understand their world. Armstrong’s point is that Victorian society placed its accent on the written text as the primary vehicle to convey meaning around 1850. Armstrong speculates that the discovery of photogravure processes and his reasonably price in the early nineteenth century make possible the shift from a literature-centered culture to an icon-centered one based on visual details for meaning. (City Things 16). The shift to visual became meaning-bearing to the end of the 19th century.
CHAPTER II
The vision of Art and artist in Victorian Poetry
2.1 The representation of artist in “Fra Lippo Lippi” and “Andrea del Sarto”
Robert Browning defines his poetry in terms of painting. He describes the poet’s role as that of a painter who makes the reader see: “I only make men and women speak, giving you truth broken into prismatic hues, and fear the pure white light, even if it is in me” (qtd. in Griffin and Minchin 57). Browning “Fra Lippo Lippi” and “Andrea del Sarto” seems most evocative when he is describing the process by which a painter comes to complete his work. Browning “get into the souls of his characters and show us how they felt what they felt, and why they did what they did” (Smith 10). Browning succeeds to revive the Italian Renaissance artist evaluating their lives in terms of success and failure. Artists are the voice of society, expressing their thoughts in their works besides their soul. He turns to his knowledge of early Italian painting to illustrate the problems in reconciling the two opposing forces in art – the flesh and the spirit.
2.1.1 Fra Lippo Lippi realism or idealism in art / the flesh or the soul
Poetry as an art form could manage subjects as religious dignity and idealized passion based on murder, hatred and madness and love. The length of the time period and location gives Browning the chance to critique and explore contemporary issues without fear of alienating his reader. He has the ability to create various characters or take them from real life, group them with consummate effect, place them in a dramatic situation, brighten tragedy with jollity, mellow comedy with tragedy, and produce a pure and objective dramatic literature (Stedman 293).
“Fra Lippo Lippi” appeared in the 1855 collection Men and Women and it “is one the happiest expressions of Browning’s belief in art and the joy of living” (De Vane 196). Men and Women consists of fifty one poems and majority of them is concentrated on the life of a male character.“Fra Lippo Lippi” is based on Browning’s reading of Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists, in which is it discussed the life of the Florentine painter and friar, Filippo Lippi (1406-1469), as well as the friar’s ideas about art. “Browning has woven his own interpretation of the history of Italian painting and his own conception of the function of art in general”. (De Vane 345)
The poem is written in the first person and is a classical example of a dramatic monologue. To grasp Browning’s Fra Lippo Lippi completely it is useful to have a look at the historical background of the poem. Browning dramatized an existing historical character: Fra Filippo di Tommaso Lippi (1412-1469), who was born in Florence and died in Spoleto. At the age of two, di Tommaso Lippi became an orphan and he was raised by his aunt. When he reached the age of eight, his aunt placed him in the convent of the Carmine. Filippo was obsessed with the art of drawing and painting. He was extremely inspired by Masaccio, who painted the chapel of the Carmine. Cosimo de’ Medici wanted him to paint his palace but Fra Filippo’s reputation of “pleasure-hunter” convinced Cosimo de’ Medici to have him locked until he has done his assignment. Even so, Fra Filippo was able to escape, making a rope with sheets of his bed, and travelled through the city. Browning’s monologue takes place during this excursion in the city .
The poem is mainly concerned with two arguments, firstly the role of an artist, specifically of the painter in Lippi’s case, and with the traditions of the Church. The action of the poem Fra Lippo Lippi is set in a back alley beside a brothel despite the fact that it takes place during the Renaissance in Florence. A “grotesque mixture of monk and man”, as is described by Roma King in The Bow and the Lyre, Fra Lippo Lippi is the speaker of the poem (47). Lippi is being discovered by the Florentine city guard during the spring Carnival. His first reaction is one of alarmed surprise shorter, followed by a protest because of having torches thrust at his face. Lippo runs through a whole series of emotions – both real and feigned. He speaks straightforwardly and confidently:
I am poor brother Lippo, by your leave!
You need not clap your torches to my face.
Zooks, what’s to blame? You think you see a monk!
What, ‘tis past midnight, and you go the rounds,
And here you catch me at an alley’s end
Where sportive ladies leave their doors ajar? (Lines 1-6)
Fra Lippo is in the same time a man of God, a monk, and a sensualist artist. Those characteristics are exposed throughout the poem:
I always seen, the garden and God there
A-making man’s wife: and, my lesson learned,
The value and significance of flesh
I can’t unlearn ten minutes afterwards (Lines 266-269)
Lippo’s religious nature serves as a background for his sensuality which became clear. His sensuality is the antithesis of his religion. Religion is impersonated as the opposite of all that is natural. About the duality in Lippo’s character Roma King states:
Lippo is caught at the beginning of the poem between the street where “sportive ladies leave their doors ajar” and his monastic lodging. The situation and the terms are symbolic. The street and monastery represent apparently contradictory forces, both religious and artistic, which Lippo is challenged to reconcile. They pose a tension between sensuous beauty and animal passion, on the one hand, and self –abnegation and spiritual discipline on the other… (33)
His purpose is to achieve integration in his painting, to unify the body and soul, nature and spirit. His mundane spirit is not able to accept the celibate life. Fra Lippo Lippi points out the absurdity of mandatory celibacy, a wasting of youth and life in the following paragraph:
I’m grown a man no doubt, I’ve broken bounds;
You should not take a fellow eight years old
And make him swear to never kiss the girls” (Lines 224-225)
The narrator of this poem pleads for his life in cloister, one that has been inhuman and restrictive, and he cries the lack of life he is allowed to have. Lippo is a prisoner between conflicting systems of though and ways of life. Lippi was orphaned as a boy and taken into the monastery aged eight, but he considers the teaching he was given in vain as: “All the Latin I construe is, ‘amo’ I love!” (Line 111) He wants to be allowed to draw in the manner he feels right and that is the realistic style. He believes that the capturing of the visible is the best way to portray the beauty of God’s creations which should be the concern of the monks.
Friar Lippo is seen as an artist forced to break the promises made for monasticism in order that his natural instincts as a man may have free play; otherwise he cannot achieve himself as an artist. (Reeves xxix) Lippo’s artistic ideas rise naturally from his thoughts of life. Art can make human beings realize how amazing and beautiful the world is:
For, don’t you mark? We’re made so that we love
First when we see them painted, things we have passed
Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see;
And so they are better, painted – better to us,
Which is the same thing.
Art was given for that;
God uses us to help each other so,
Lending our minds out. (Lines 300-306)
In this passage he discusses “objective” art. Browning states that an artist is “one whose endeavor has been to reproduce things external … with an immediate reference, in every case, to the common eye and apprehension of his fellow men” (Reeves 137). Both statements claim that art makes possible the reinterpretation of the symbolic meaning of objects and images, and that the poet/artist's function is to reveal meaning to others. Poets, are not only the authors of language and of music, of the dance, and architecture, and painting: they are the institutors of laws, and the forefather of civil society, and the inventors of the arts of life, and the teachers, who draw into a certain proximity with the beautiful and the true . The function of Art is not to improve upon Nature, but to open men's eyes to the best in her. All that is necessary is that the artist to show the meaning already existing there. For Ruskin as well as for Lippi, nature was apparently charged with the grandeur of God:
The beauty and the wonder and the power,
The shapes of things, their colours, lights and shades,
Changes, surprises – and God made it all.
. . . paint these
Just as they are, careless what comes of it [.]
God’s works – paint any one, and count it crime
To let a truth slip. ( Lines 283–5, 293–6)
John Ower states that, “Central to Browning’s 'Fra Lippo Lippi’is the painter's struggle to maintain his spiritual and artistic integrity in a society dominated by false values” (135).
In response to church’s pressure to conform to the aesthetic values of monastery, Lippi says:
Now is this sense, I ask?
A fine way to paint a soul, by painting body
So ill, the eye can't stop there, must go further
And can't fare worse…
…
Why can't a painter lift each foot in turn,
Left foot and right foot, go a double step,
Make his flesh liker and his soul more like,
Both in their order? (Lines 199-208)
Lippi’s comments point out that he recognizes the impossible aesthetic ideals of the medieval Church. He doesn’t agree to take apart the body of soul, feeling that those who think otherwise are morally confused and hypocritical.
Browning assumes that every aspect of human life is necessary to a faithful depiction. The artist makes us see the unseen, something that we might pass by without giving so much attention. At first sight contemplation of beautiful object in nature, art and literature have no significance, but progressively stimulate in our soul a primary sense of what Beauty may imply.
Or say there’s beauty with no soul at all –
(I never saw it – put the case the same –)
If you get simple beauty and naught else,
You get about the best thing God invents:
That’s somewhat: and you’ll find the souk you have missed,
Whitin yourself, when you return him thanks. (Lines 215-20)
On the Prior's assumption and by Lippi’s own conviction, the function of Art is the same as that of Religion; but to learn the meaning of both truly, one must abandon the ways of Prior. Art can deeply stir the emotions and move men to right conduct.
For pity and religion grow i' the crowd —
Your painting serves its purpose! (Lines 334-35)
He attempts to personify the truth through art. Lippi uses real people as his models and “Faces, arms, legs and bodies”, “…eyes and nose and chin for A’s and B’s (line 177) became inspirational for his art since he grew up on the streets. The adoring saints or other characters of the celestial hierarchy are just portraits of the everyday people he has met with. He joins issue with the artistic tradition into which he has been born. This realistic painting of saint and sinner violates the cannon accepted by monastery:
The Prior and the learned pulled a face
And stopped all that in no time. “How? what’s here?”
Quite from the mark of painting, bless us all!
Faces, arms, legs and bodies like the true
As much as pea and pea! It’s devil’s-game! (Lines 174-78)
This is the way of idealism divorced from realism (Smith 15). Realism is the presentation of natural objects as the artist sees them, as he thinks they are. It is the attempt to imitate things as they strike the senses. Idealism is the presentation of natural objects as the artist fain would see them, as he thinks they strive to be. It is the attempt to imitate things as the mind interprets them (Smith 123).
The depictions of the “fat and lean: then, folk at church, / From good old gossips waiting to confess…” (145-146) are not part of the church’s vision of reality. The church believes he should paint church-related paintings, but Lippi does not agree and is unhappy to paint "saints and saints/and saints again".
Isobel Armstrong in Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics identified the inspiration of Lippi’s first paintings: “It is impossible to paint unless you have experienced what you paint, the real. The real means on the one hand a sexual freedom and on the other an understanding of deprivation and poverty.” (301). Lippi explains that the images and inspirations for his paintings come from the people he saw when he was surviving on the streets as a child in complete poverty.
Lippi’s view of art brings him into conflict with Prior which mentions him that his duty is to paint the soul, not legs or arms. Lippi’s art is too real, too lifelike. Being with an eye toward the beauty in the world he seems to be first an artist and second a monk. He believes that to reproduce what is beautiful in life is the mission of Art. Art is God’s will and we see the Beauty through artist’s mind and final work.
Your business in not to catch men with show
With homage to the perishable clay
But lift them over it, ignore it all
Make them forget there’s such a thing as flesh
Your business is to paint the souls of men (Lines 179-183)
…………………………………………………………
“Paint the soul, never mind the legs and arms! (Line 193)
Lippo impersonates the Prior to illustrate the unreasonable attitudes with which he must live. Quoting the Prior, Lippo says:
His works
Are here already; nature is complete:
Suppose you reproduce her — (which you can't)
There's no advantage! you must beat her then." (Lines 297-9)
Throughout his poem, Fra Lippo Lippi is questioning the purpose of art. Should art be realistic or should it be visionary and didactic? Should Lippi’s painting of saints look like the Prior’s mistress or the men of the neighborhood or should be abstract? The connection between art and morality is in fact what most interests Browning in his work.
Fra Lippo Lippi discusses the role of an artist in the society and the influence of society on the art itself. Lippi comes to conclusion he cannot paint in a manner which would satisfy everyone: “I’m my own master / Paint now as I please. (226) Painting the soul besides painting the body is all that he asks for. He feels that the development of an artist should not be restricted by church’s control. He has shaped a theory of art by his own restriction. The artist can only become sovereign when he is able to express his true abilities and desire. The church imposes people how to express the soul in art and artists ‘souls are smothered.
The references to other subjects along the poem highlight the gap between his desires and constrains of church life. He uses this historical figure to compare writers of his own age with the fifteenth-century artist.
Fra Lippo Lippi mentions the Christian father Saint Jerome: “On Jerome knocking at his poor old breast” (line 73). Saint Jerome is known for his austere life which clearly contrasts with the earthly life of the protagonist of the poem. The mentioning of a “round stone” in line 74 is related to a passage in Saint Jerome‘s The Scole Master (1906) in which he assures his readers that there “is no such whetstone to sharpen a good wit and encourage a will to learning, as praise”. Line 189 refers to “Giotto”, Giotto di Bondone (1276-1337) who planned the Campanile in Florence. Perhaps the most famous of all the early Italian painters was also sculptor and architect as well. The old monastic ideal of painting is exposed here in the text:
Here’ Giotto, with his Saint a praising God,
That sets us praising – why not stop with him?
Why put all thoughts of praise out of our head
Why wonder at lines, colors and what not?
…
Rub all out, try at it a second time.
Fra Angelico, Giovanni da Fiesole (1387-1455), mentioned in line 235, was one of the greatest of the old medieval school of religious painters against which Lippo revolts. In the next line, 236, Lippo mentions another painter, Lorenzo Monaco (1370-1425) as “Brother Lorenzo”, with the same medieval traditions as Fra Angelico. Painter, Tommaso Guidi (1401-1428) is referred to in line 276 making clear that from his time, and forward, religious painting in the old sense was at an end. Painters no longer attempted to go above nature, but to copy her in her loveliest aspects. The scriptural and artistic allusions which Fra Lippo Lippi uses emphasize one more the strong conflict he experiencing between two ways of life. He balances between Biblical figures or events to which he turns his attention and the medieval tradition in art precisely to make his revolt clear against the church’s vision of art.
Marie Ada Molineux states: “Browning, of all the poets of his day, possessed in most marvelous degree the subtle power of penetrating, ranging, exploring to the uttermost the complex minds of men; of catching the twists, the turns, the unexpected moral, unmoral, immoral windings of intellect and heart, and of picturing the certain results. He shows the stern law of cause and effect; he places before us lessons to ponder and digest, sermons, seldom preachments, stories from real life, each with the warning or the example.” (qtd in Bailey 63)
DeVane and Langbaum argued that Browning uses Lippo to elucidate Browning’s personal positions on religious, social and aesthetic issues. DeVane writes, "Certainly the artistic creed which Browning ascribes to Fra Lippo Lippi is much more his own than Lippi's" (218). In the same way, Thomas J. Collins writes that Lippi "serves as a mouthpiece for Browning’s ideas on the nature of art" (Collins 143), a frequent idea of other likeminded readers of the poem. Ignoring Browning's statement that the poems were "Dramatic in principle, and so many utterances of so many imaginary persons, not mine" (1895: 163), several readings suggest that his understanding of Lippo’s thoughts is an evidence to demonstrate that the reverse is true.
Robert Garratt, in his essay "Browning's Dramatic Monologue: The Strategy of the Double-Mask" (1973), discusses the possibility of Browning's poetry representing several poetic voices. The shifts in Lippo's tone, the treatment of the auditor, as well as looking at the poetic listener's reactions to Lippo are Garratt’s priorities in his reading examines. Garratt demonstrates how speakers use masks as a rhetorical strategy. These masks are created to hide some aspect of the individual's personality by replacing it with a more complimentary form (115). According to Garratt, Lippo's tonality changes throughout the poem depending on what he wants to say and how he interprets the reaction of his audience. Garratt's belief that Lippi pull on his own dramatic mask is deep-rooted in the poem when Lippo is first capture by the authorities. He says to the officers that:
I am poor brother Lippo, by your leave!
You need not clap your torches to my face.
Zooks, what's to blame? you think you see a monk! (Lines 1-3)
He is guilty and seeks ways to get away. In the begining, Lippo acts in a friendly manner toward the unknown police official; when he recognizes that this approach is not working, Lippo adopts a new attitude by changing the tone of his speech, most notably when he swears ('zooks'). Lippo's persona shifts demonstrate his manipulation of language and his ability to recognize when he can act familiarly or must be more formal towards his listener. Such an approach creates the potential for a variety of interpretations.
“The dawn of the Renaissance in Italy at a point when the medieval attitude towards life and art was about to be displaced by a fresh appreciation of earthly pleasure” is portrayed in this poem. (Abrams 825)
Tennyson also moves increasingly towards poetry of dramatic mask, as he provides mythological identities for his lyric speakers. Using sensation to depict mood and character, his poetry is closer to the dramatized subjectivity of Browning’s monologues than the contrast between their poetics would seem to suggest. Each transforms the universal subjectivity of Romanticism, in which the ‘I’ of the poet claims to represent each of us, to a dramatic representation of individual psychology that treats any such claim with irony.