Fra Lippo Lippi was born in Florence in 1406. See Vasari's _Lives of the
Painters_ for the account of his life on which Browning based his poem.
(Vasari's account is quoted in Cooke's _Browning Guide Book_.)
2. _You need not clap your torches._ Throughout this lively dramatic
monologue it is important to mark every indication of the words or
gestures of the auditors; for instance, in lines 13, 18, 26, etc.
7. _The Carmine._ Fra Lippo Lippi's entrance into the monastery of the
friars del Carmine and his education there are described later in the
poem. He lived there till he was twenty-six. He had no vocation for the
life of a monk and wished to devote himself to painting. He apparently
left the monastery on good terms with the friars.
17. _Master--a Cosimo of the Medici._ Cosimo de Medici (1389-1464) was a
rich Florentine banker and statesman. He was a magnificent patron of art
and literature. The old Medici palace (l. 17), now known as _Palazzo
Riccardi_, is on the corner of the _Via Cavour_ and the _Via Gori_. The
church of _San Lorenzo_ (the "Saint Laurence" of l. 67) is a short
distance farther west on the Via Gori.
22. _Pick up a manner_. The painter protests against the rough usage to
which he has been subjected.
23. _Zooks._ An interjection formerly written "gadzooks." _Pilchards_
are a common cheap fish of the Mediterranean and are taken in seines.
28. _Quarter-florin._ The florin was a gold coin of Florence. It was
first struck off in the twelfth century and was called a florin because
it had a flower stamped on one side.
31. _I'd like his face._ The painter cannot look upon the crowd of men
about him without seeing faces he would like to draw. One man would do
as a model for Judas. Another would do well in a picture Fra Lippo's
imagination quickly conjures up of a slave holding the head of John the
Baptist by the hair. In Fra Lippo's real picture of the beheading of
John the Baptist the head is brought in by Salome, the daughter of
Herodias, on a great platter.
46. _Carnival._ The days preceding Lent. A period marked by much gaiety,
street revelry, masking, etc.
53. _Flower o' the broom._ These flower songs, called _stornelli_, are
improvised by the peasants at their work. "The _stornelli_ consists of
three lines. The first line usually contains the name of a flower which
sets the rhyme and is five syllables long. Then the love theme is told
in two lines of eleven syllables each, agreeing by rhyme, assonance, or
repetition with the first." (Porter and Clarke note in Camberwell
Edition.) Browning does not follow the model strictly.
73. _Jerome._ St. Jerome was one of the Fathers of the Christian Church.
During a part of his early life he was given up to worldly pleasures,
and for this he did penance by living for a number of years in a cave in
a desert region. The penitent St. Jerome was a popular devotional
subject in early Christian art. "The scene is generally a wild rocky
solitude; St. Jerome, half-naked, emaciated, with matted hair and beard,
is seen on his knees before a crucifix, beating his breast with a
stone." (Mrs. Jameson, _Sacred and Legendary Art_, i, 308.)
80. _What am I a beast for?_ If you had happened, says Fra Lippo, to
catch Cosimo in a frolic like this, of course you would have said
nothing; but you think a monk is a beast if he indulges in these
nocturnal pleasures. Yet why should the fact that I break monastic rules
make you consider me a beast? Just let me tell you how I happened to
become a monk.
83. _I starved there._ Note the vivid picture of the life of a street
gamin here and in lines 112-126.
88. _Aunt Lapaccia._ Vasari says, "The child was for some time under the
care of a certain Mona Lapaccia, his aunt, who brought him up with very
great difficulty till he had attained his eighth year, when, being no
longer able to support the burden of his maintenance, she placed him in
the above-named convent of the Carmelites." "Trussed," means "firmly
seized."
117. _Which gentlemen_, etc. Gentlemen clad in fine ecclesiastical robes
walk in the religious procession and carry tall wax candles or torches;
the drippings from these candles the street-urchin wishes to catch in
order to sell them again, but it is against the law, and the fine
gentlemen if not kindly disposed may call in the magistrates ("The
Eight") and have the boy whipped.
130. _The antiphonary's marge._ He scrawled his sketches on the margins
of the book used by the choir, and he made faces out of the notes, which
were then square with long stems.
139. _We Carmelites._ The three orders of monks, the Carmelites, the
Camaldolese, and the Dominicans (called "Preaching Brothers" by Pope
Innocent III) owned various monasteries and churches, and were each
ambitious to possess the greatest sacred paintings.
145-163. These lines describe the different figures painted on the wall
by Fra Lippo when the prior bade him "daub away." The monks dressed in
black or white according to the garb of their orders; the old women
waiting to confess small thefts; the row of admiring little children
gazing at a bearded fellow, a murderer who, still breathing hard with
the run that has brought him in safety to the altar steps, defies the
"white anger" of his victim's son, who has followed him into the church;
the girl who loves the brute of a murderer, and brings him flowers,
food, and her earrings to aid him when he shall escape--all these are
painted on the wall. Then the young artist took down the ladder by means
of which he had reached the bit of cloister-wall where he had been
recording his observations of life, and called the monks to see.
156. _Whose sad face._ The purpose of Christ's suffering ("passion") on
the cross was to bring love into the world, but after a thousand years
of his teaching his image looks down upon theft, anger, murder.
172. _My triumph's straw-fire._ Lippo's triumph was as short-lived as a
fire of straw. The monks were delighted with the realism of the
painting, but when the Prior and the critics came they declared that
such "homage to the perishable clay" was a mere "devil's game." The
business of the painter, they said, was to ignore the body and paint the
soul.
184. _Man's soul._ Note the difficulty the Prior experiences when he
tries to describe the "soul" he wishes the artist to paint. Lines
185-186 represent an old superstition.
189-198. In contrast to the homely realism of Fra Lippo's picture of
ordinary people are the idealism, the religious symbolism, of the
pictures of Giotto, a painter a century and a half earlier than Fra
Lippo, and the greatest master of the early school of Italian art.
198-214. An exposition of Fra Lippo's idea of painting. He says that it
is nonsense to ignore the body in order to make the soul preëminent,
that the painter should go a "double step" and paint both body and soul.
He may make the face of a girl as lovely and life-like as possible, and
at the same time show her soul in her face.
215-220. A defense of the value of beauty for its own sake. Cf. Keats,
"Ode to a Grecian Urn," and the beginning of his "Endymion." Fra Lippo
Lippi has been long out of convent limitations, but he cannot forget how
certain the monks were that he had chosen the wrong path, and that he
could never equal the great painter, Fra Angelico (1389-1455), who,
kneeling in adoration, painted lovely saints and angels, nor even
Lorenzo Monaca, a Florentine painter with the same tendencies as
Angelico.
257. _Out at grass._ _Grass_ in this passage stands for enjoyment of
life as opposed to asceticism.
276. _Guidi._ Tommaso Guidi, ordinarily known as Masaccio, or
Tomassacio, Slovenly or Hulking Tom. Browning followed good authority in
making Masaccio a pupil of Fra Lippo Lippi, but in point of fact he was
probably the master whose works Fra Lippo studied. Lübke (_History of
Art_ ii, 207) says of Guidi: "In his exceedingly short life he rapidly
traversed the various stages of development of earlier art, and pressed
on with a bold confidence to a greatness and power of vision which have
rendered his works the characteristic ones of an epoch, and his example
a decisive influence in all the art of the fifteenth century.... Almost
every master in the fifteenth century ... studied these great works and
learned from them. One of the first of these masters was Fra Lippo
Lippi." The important point is that Fra Lippo and Masaccio were both
pioneers in the new art which took infinite pains in the representation
of the body. Masaccio is said to have been the first Italian artist to
paint a nude figure.
323. _A Saint Laurence ... at Prato._ Prato a town near Florence,
attracted many artists in the fifteenth century, so that one finds there
many specimens of Early Renaissance painting. Some of the most important
of Fra Lippo Lippi's large works are in the Cathedral at Prato.
326-334. The people have been so enraged at the slaves who are pictured
as assisting in the martyrdom of St. Laurence that the faces of these
slaves have been scratched from the wall. The monks think the picture a
huge success because it has thus roused religious zeal.
339. _Chianti wine._ A famous wine named from Chianti, a mountain group
near Siena, Italy.
346. _Sant Ambrogio's._ The picture described here is the "Coronation of
the Virgin" now in the _Accademia delle Belle Arti_ of Florence. _Sant'
Ambrogio_ is a Florentine church named after St. Ambrose, a Bishop of
Milan.
354. _St. John._ The Baptist. Note the reference to camel's hair raiment
in l. 375. _The Battistero_, the original cathedral of Florence, was
dedicated to John the Baptist. Some say the reliefs on one of its famous
bronze doors represent scenes from his life. To this church all children
born in Florence are brought to be baptized.