In "Fra Lippo Lippi", Robert Browning satirizes the essentially corrupt relationship between

the Italian Renaissance tradition of art patronage, the Medici family, and the Roman Catholic
church. The poem takes a dialectic structure enabling Lippi to describe and debunk the
tradition of art patronage and then pose his own theory about the role of art and artist in
society. He describes the censorious limitations which occur when representatives of the
Church tell the artist
Your business is not to catch men with show,
With homage to the perishable clay,
But life 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. [ ll.183-87]
Browning suggests here that church doctrine transform art into propaganda rather than
creative expression. These devotional works do not promote a critical awareness of life
because the friars compel Lippo Lippi to create idealized representations of life, claiming that
art should depict Gods desires rather than human folly.
God's works-paint any one, and count it crime
To let a truth slip. Don't object, "His works
Are here already; nature is complete:
Suppose you reproduce here-(which you can't)
There's no advantage! You must beat her, then." [ll. 295-99]
Lippi tells the reader that the friars object to realistic art because it does not inspire obedience
to church doctrine; but the Fra clearly believes that devotional art does not foster the spiritual
and intellectual development of the individual. By placing more faith in the masses, Lippi
acts far more discriminatingly than his patrons and superiors. He further attacks idealized
devotional art by relentlessly emphasizing the moral hypocrisy of the men of the church. It is
important to note that Browning does not debunk belief in God; he castigates those religious
authorities who dictate moral imperatives to the common people which they themselves do
not follow. Browning uses this hypocrisy to persuade his readers that idealized, artistic
representations of life do not inspire people to uncritical devotion. He argues for a less
exclusionary vision of art which permits the exploration of life's "plain meaning". For the Fra,
the night watchman represents a kind of new ideal because he engages all of life, not the
censored version sanctioned by the church. Lippi asks,
What's it all about?
To be passed over, despised? or dwelt upon,
Wondered at? oh, this last of course! you say.
But why not do as well as say, 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. [ll.290-6]

Browning satirizes the hypocrisy of the monks and condemns a theory of art which denies the
potential of ordinary people to cultivate a conscious awareness of life and art. As with the
other friars, Fra Lippo Lippi believes art should capture moments of experience and
transform them into focal points of beauty. Yet, Browning suggests that the traditional, idyllic
definition of beauty espoused by the church turns art into propaganda. Instead, he proposes
that honest, realistic portrayals of life should be channeled into these aesthetic moments.
Browning increases the drama of "Fra Lippo Lippi" by portraying the monk as an artist still
caught in this traditional system of art patronage. Lippo Lippi emphasizes the hypocrisy of
his position because the inspiration for his exalted, religious paintings comes from abased
sources. For example, he finds the inspiration for patron saints in the face of the Prior's socalled niece and informs the night watchman in the final stanza that the evening's incident being caught leaving a brothel - will inspire his next painting. The monk makes clear the
depths of his frustration regarding the powerful force of censorship in which he is caught.
So I swallow my rage,
Clench my teeth, suck my lips in tight, and paint
To please them-sometimes do and sometimes don't. [ll. 242-4]
Appropriately, in this interlude the Fra invokes the Medici name, relying upon the entrenched
social hierarchy to protect himself. Above all others, the Medici family propagated the system
of art patronage which Fra Lippo Lippi condemns. They represent the Roman Catholic
church at its most abased level. Thus, in "Fra Lippo Lippi" Browning relentlessly indicts
religious hypocrisy and elitist conceptions of art with his realistic, satirical portrait of one
monk. In this, the poet reflects the increasingly democratic mores of nineteenth-century
British society.

Fra Lippo Lippi is the one of the most popular of Brownings 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 Brownings conviction about art
and its relationship to reality and the Ideal; in fact, the poem expresses many of Brownings
ideas about life and art, ideal and reality, religion and morality, and especially the function of
art or the responsibility of the artist.
Lippos 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! Lippos 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 Brownings 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 Lippis. 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 Lippis delight in painting the portraits of
contemporaries in his work. We get the gist of Brownings own philosophy of life in the
words of Lippi when he says: This worlds 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 Lippis view of the purpose of
painting, but also the poets 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 Lippis 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 Gods 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.