Selections From The Poems And Plays Of Robert Browning Part 43

This poem is the story of an obscure poet in the Spanish city of Valladolid. It brings out his actual life and the townfolk's misinterpretations of it. Reports multiply upon themselves and take new meanings till the harmless poet is generally accounted the King's spy and the real agent of all royal edicts, the town's master, in fact. The interest which, as a poet, he takes in all manifestations of life is popularly supposed to be the alertness of a secret agent of the government. The reams of poetry he writes are transformed into letters of information to the King. Rumor translates the poet's perfectly decent, regular, meager life into secret sybaritic extravagances.

7. _Though none did._ His suit had once been fas.h.i.+onable, but, though still serviceable, was of a sort no longer worn by his fellow townsmen.

25. _The coffee-roaster's brazier._ The coffee is roasted in a dish that is made to revolve over the coals in an open pan or basin.

74. _Beyond the Jewry._ Beyond the Jew's quarter, a squalid portion of the city.

90. _The Corregidor._ The Spanish t.i.tle for a magistrate.

104. _Here had been._ The poet, misconceived by his generation, poor, and lonely, has yet a great spiritual personality. Men see the old coat.

G.o.d, the King for whom he works, sees his real nature; hence heavenly guards attend when this man comes to die.

115. _The Prado._ The chief fas.h.i.+onable promenade of Madrid.

FRA LIPPO LIPPI

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, a.s.sonance, or repet.i.tion 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 ("pa.s.sion") 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 superst.i.tion.

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 preeminent, 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 gra.s.s._ _Gra.s.s_ in this pa.s.sage stands for enjoyment of life as opposed to asceticism.

276. _Guidi._ Tommaso Guidi, ordinarily known as Masaccio, or Toma.s.sacio, 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. Lubke (_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 a.s.sisting 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.

357. _Job._ See _Job_ i, 1.

360. _Up shall come._ Artists not infrequently painted their own portraits in their pictures. In the "Coronation of the Virgin" Fra Lippo's round tonsured head is seen in the lower right hand corner.

377. _Iste perfecit opus._ "This one did the work."

381. _Hot c.o.c.kles._ An old English game in which a blind-folded player tries to guess the names of those who touch or strike him.

ANDREA DEL SARTO

Andrea del Sarto's father was a tailor (_Sarto_) and so the son was nicknamed "The Tailor's Andrew." He was born in 1486. His first paintings were seven frescoes in the Church of the Annunziata in Florence. They were "marvelous productions for a youth who was little over twenty, and remain Andrea's most charming and attractive works."

(Julia Cartwright, _The Painters of Florence_.) Algernon Charles Swinburne in _Essays and Studies_ ("Notes and Designs on the Old Masters at Florence") says of Andrea's early paintings in comparison with his later work: "These are the first fruits of his flowering manhood, when the bright and buoyant genius in him had free play and large delight in its handiwork; when the fresh interest of invention was still his, and the dramatic sense, the pleasure in the play of life, the power of motion and variety; before the old strength of sight and of flight had pa.s.sed from weary wing and clouding eye, the old pride and energy of enjoyment had gone out of hand and heart.

"How the change fell upon him, and how it wrought, anyone may see who compares his later with his earlier work.... The time came when another than Salome [referring to Andrea del Sarto's picture of Salome dancing before Herod] was to dance before the eyes of the painter; and she required of him the head of no man, but his own soul; and he paid the forfeit into her hands.... In Mr. Browning's n.o.blest poem--his n.o.blest, it seems to me--the whole tragedy is distilled into the right words, the whole man raised up and reclothed with flesh. One point only is but lightly touched upon--missed it could not be by an eye so sharp and skillful--the effect upon his art of the poisonous solvent of love. How his life was corroded by it, and his soul burnt into dead ashes we are shown in full, but we are not shown in full what as a painter he was before, what as a painter he might have been without it."