Fra Lippo Lippi as Renaissance :
Apart from being a monumental dramatic monologue, Robert Browning’s “Fra Lippo Lippi” is a quintessential testament of Renaissance art anc mindset. Lippo, a monk-painter, is tossed between his twin personalities of a monk and an artist, though his artistic self eventually emerges to be victorious. He is impatient of the distorting effect of piety on art and considers no worldly beauty to be blasphemous. In his constant effort to link the spiritual elegance with the corporeal beauty, Browning makes Lippo an irresponsible scapegrace – a tonsured Falstaff – with an appetite for the delights of the palate and the senses who prefers to feel beauty in the real, tangible world : ” We would rather have Fra Lippo Lippi than any essay on Realism in art”( George Eliot). It is this vibrance, multidimensionality of beauty and the swift variety in the intensity of the movement of the intellectual and social life that become prominent in Browning’s portrait of Lippo.
Renaissance is synonymous with rekindled interest in mandane beauty, love for materialistic world, and a shift of concern from the metaphysical world of spirits to the physical world of men. The conflict between spirituality and sensuousness is what constitutes the persona of Lippo. For the sake of livelihood, he had to choose a monk’s life since he was eight years old but his sole interest was centred around art. He always tried to combine these two contrary aspects through his painting and his vocation “to paint soul, by painting the body”. He didn’t dismiss the Divine for the materialistic world but attempted to realize the Almighty through his worldly creations.
The theme of love and love interest plays an important role in Browning’s dramatic monologue. Lippo’s love for life and its simple beauty is prominent throughout the poem. What he mostly loves is painting figures of men and women. He loves the variety the world offers in forms of charming Nature and charming people. He is suffocated in his act of painting ” saints and saints/ And saints again”. He desires ” to paint soul, by painting the body”. The only significant Latin word he could learn by heart and regarded the philosophy of his life is “amo” – ” I love”. Possessed by the Keatsian doctrine of ” Beauty is truth, truth beauty”, Lippo also utters the most profound and archetypal truth of life : ” Take away love, and our earth is a tomb”.
