Curtis Fox: There is no other way to put it. This is a repeat podcast from April of 2006. For those of you who have recently started to listen to the poetryfoundation.org podcast, please know that there are dozens and dozens of podcasts already produced waiting for you to download them at poetryfoundation.org.  Click on “Audio”.

This is The Poetry Foundation Podcast for Friday April 21st. I’m Curtis Fox. Today, an exploration of Robert Browning’s great monologue, “Fra Lippo Lippi”. In his lifetime, Robert Browning was never as popular a poet as his wife Elizabeth Barrett Browning. You remember her; “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways”. But over the years, his stock has risen and he is now probably the most read of his generation of Victorian poets. Better loved than even Tennyson, and certainly more fun that Matthew Arnold. From the late 1840s to the early 1860s, Browning lived in Italy, and many of his best poems are the historical monologues set in Renaissance Italy. One of the longest, funniest and most intellectually engaging of them is called “Fra Lippo Lippi”. It’s in the voice of Fra Lippo Lippi, the 15th century Florentine painter who was also a monk with a pinched for the ladies. Our guide to the poem is the poet W.S. Di Piero. He was recorded in front of a Fra Lippa Lippo painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The reader of the poem itself is Paul Giamatti.

W.S. Di Piero: The poem starts with Fra Lippo being caught late at night in the red light district of Florence, and he’s dressed like a monk because that’s what he was.

Paul Giamatti:

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?

W.S. Di Piero: And he’s stopped by the constables, the local constabulary, and they say, “What are you doing here at this time of night in this neighborhood?” He says, “I can explain everything”.

Paul Giamatti:

Who am I?

Why, one, sir, who is lodging with a friend

Three streets off—he's a certain . . . how d'ye call?

Master—a ...Cosimo of the Medici,

I' the house that caps the corner.

W.S. Di Piero: He tries to talk his way out of a very dicey situation. One of the ways he does it is by essentially claiming that he’s friends with the governor, because he says “I’m working for the great man that lives up there. How you call him? Cosimo? You know who I’m talking about”. It’s just his way of weasling out of situation.

Paul Giamatti:

I'd like his face—

His, elbowing on his comrade in the door

With the pike and lantern,—for the slave that holds

John Baptist's head a-dangle by the hair

With one hand

W.S. Di Piero: He’s essentially already imagining which of these people who are laying hands on him he’s going to use as models.

Paul Giamatti:

Yes, I'm the painter, since you style me so.

What, brother Lippo's doings, up and down,

You know them and they take you? like enough!

I saw the proper twinkle in your eye—

'Tell you, I liked your looks at very first.

W.S. Di Piero: What Browning has to do as an artist is find a way of positioning Fra Lippo Lippi dramatically in such a way that he can tell his life story, most of which Browning cribbed from Giorgio Vasari Lives of the Artists, written in 1505 I think. Vasari actually describes how Cosimo would lock up Fra Lippo in his garret to produce these paintings of saints. One night, he got so tired of producing all these paintings of saints that he tore up his bedsheets and made a rope out of his bedsheets, threw it out his window, went down the rope and basically spent the night catting around the streets of Florence. He was known to do this.

Paul Giamatti:

Scarce had they turned the corner when a titter

Like the skipping of rabbits by moonlight,—three slim shapes,

And a face that looked up . . . zooks, sir, flesh and blood,

That's all I'm made of! Into shreds it went,

Curtain and counterpane and coverlet,

All the bed-furniture—a dozen knots,

There was a ladder! Down I let myself,

Hands and feet, scrambling somehow, and so dropped,

And after them.

W.S. Di Piero: During the course of that poem, Fra Lippo describes his own upbringing. He was poor, he was orphaned, he grew up on the streets. He learned how to read faces because he had to figure out which face was going to give him a scrap of food and which face was going to kick him.

Paul Giamatti:

I was a baby when my mother died

And father died and left me in the street.

I starved there, God knows how, a year or two

On fig-skins, melon-parings, rinds and shucks,

Refuse and rubbish. One fine frosty day,

My stomach being empty as your hat,

The wind doubled me up and down I went.

Old Aunt Lapaccia trussed me with one hand,

(Its fellow was a stinger as I knew)

And so along the wall, over the bridge,

By the straight cut to the convent. Six words there,

While I stood munching my first bread that month:

"So, boy, you're minded," quoth the good fat father

Wiping his own mouth, 'twas refection-time,—

"To quit this very miserable world?

Will you renounce" . . . "the mouthful of bread?" thought I;

By no means! Brief, they made a monk of me;

W.S. Di Piero: This is to my ear, marvellously efficient, dramatic narrative writing. It also has some of the texturing of reality and of unpleasant things. These are not aspects of reality that are presented in goldleaf.

Paul Giamatti:

First, every sort of monk, the black and white,

I drew them, fat and lean: then, folk at church,

From good old gossips waiting to confess

Their cribs of barrel-droppings, candle-ends,—

To the breathless fellow at the altar-foot,

Fresh from his murder, safe and sitting there

With the little children round him in a row

Of admiration

The monks closed in a circle and praised loud

Till checked, taught what to see and not to see,

Being simple bodies,—"That's the very man!

Look at the boy who stoops to pat the dog!

That woman's like the Prior's niece who comes

To care about his asthma: it's the life!''

But there my triumph's straw-fire flared and funked;

Their betters took their turn to see and say:

The Prior and the learned pulled a face

And stopped all that in no time.

W.S. Di Piero: During the course of Browning’s explanation to the cops, and the whole things an explanation to the crops, he says, “I got into it with my Prior because I did this picture” and he looked at it. First of all, he recognized his niece in the picture which was a problem. Second of all, he said, “Why can’t you represent piety and represent the god in us etc, the way this other moralist painter, Fra Angelico, that’s what they called him. He says, “Why can’t you do that instead of showing us in our perishable clay?” This is what during his argument with Fra Lippo Lippi the Prior says in order to defend the kind of pious art that he himself prefers. He says in regards to Fra Lippo Lippi’s art —

Paul Giamatti:

"It's art's decline, my son!

You're not of the true painters, great and old;

Brother Angelico's the man, you'll find;

Brother Lorenzo stands his single peer:

Fag on at flesh, you'll never make the third!”

W.S. Di Piero: That line, “fag on at flesh, you’ll never make the third” means if you keep toiling away at trying to represent flesh, you’re never going to make the cut. And Browning Lippo’s response to that is, “If I can represent what we actually look like, and if we are God’s creation, then I am representing the best that God can do”.

Paul Giamatti:

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? Take the prettiest face,

The Prior's niece . . . patron-saint—is it so pretty

You can't discover if it means hope, fear,

Sorrow or joy? won't beauty go with these?

Suppose I've made her eyes all right and blue,

Can't I take breath and try to add life's flash,

And then add soul and heighten them three-fold?

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 nought else,

You get about the best thing God invents:

That's somewhat: and you'll find the soul you have missed,

Within yourself, when you return him thanks.

W.S. Di Piero: The entire poem is actually Browning’s defence of his own art. Browning’s values which are being represented by Fra Lippo Lippi are Browning’s values as a poet. I think they’re summed up in lines Fra Lippo speaks in the poem, when he says —

Paul Giamatti:

This world's no blot for us,

Nor blank; it means intensely, and means good:

To find its meaning is my meat and drink.

W.S. Di Piero: All of those terms, “meat”, “drink”, “meaning” etc, speaks for a certain kind of artistic practice whether verbal or visual which is concerned with physical immediacy, with the actual rather than the transcendent. Or if it’s concerned with the transcendent, it’s concerned with the transcendent only in so far as it’s experience in what’s imminent, what’s here and actual. That’s Browning’s art.

Curtis Fox: You can read an essay by W.S. Di Piero about Browning’s art, and hear him comment on some of the Italian Renaissance painters that Browning loved at poetryfoundation.org, where you can also download Paul Giamatti’s reading of “Fra Lippo Lippi” in it’s entirety. That’s it for this week, we’ll have more podcasts next week. If you’re listening to these podcasts online, remember you can subscribe and receive them automatically on your computer through iTunes or your favourite podcast directory. Let us know if you’re having any trouble receiving the podcasts, or let us know what you think of this program; email us at [email protected].  We got production help this week from Eric Archer and Emily Zoigner. The music used in this program comes from the Claudia Quintet. For The Poetry Foundation Podcast, I’m Curtis Fox. Thanks for listening.