Fra Lippo Lippi (poem)

1855 poem by Robert Browning

The poet, Robert Browning

Fra Lippo Lippi is an 1855 dramatic monologue written by the Victorian poet Robert Browning which first appeared in his collection Men and Women. Throughout this poem, Browning depicts a 15th-century real-life painter, Filippo Lippi. The poem asks the question whether art should be true to life or an idealized image of life. The poem is written in blank verse, non-rhyming iambic pentameter.

A secondary theme of the dramatic monologue is the Church's influence on art. Although Fra Lippo paints real life pictures, it is the Church that requires him to redo much of it, instructing him to paint the soul, not the flesh. ("Paint the soul, never mind the legs and arms!"). Aside from the theme of the Church and its desires to change the way holiness is represented artistically, this poem also attempts to construct a way of considering the secular with the religious in terms of how a "holy" person can conduct his life. Questions of celibacy, church law, and the canon are considered as well by means of secondary characters.

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Wikisource has original text related to this article:

Fra Lippo Lippi

* Full text of the published poem is available at: U of Toronto Library
* Essay/article on the role of celibacy in Fra Lippo Lippi Archived 12 June 2007 at the Wayback Machine
* Literature Annotations
* Victorian Web

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Robert Browning

Plays|

* Strafford (1837)
* Pippa Passes (1841)
* King Victor and King Charles (1842)
* The Return of the Druses (1843)
* A Blot in the 'Scutcheon (1843)
* Colombe's Birthday (1844)
* Luria (1846)
* A Soul's Tragedy (1846)
* In a Balcony (1855)

Poetry collections
and poems|

* Pauline: A Fragment of a Confession (1833)
* Paracelsus (1835)
* "Porphyria's Lover" (1836)
* "Johannes Agricola in Meditation" (1836)
* Sordello (1840)
* Dramatic Lyrics (1842, "My Last Duchess", "Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister", "Count Gismond")
* Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (1845, "Home-Thoughts, from Abroad", "How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix", "Meeting at Night", "The Laboratory", "The Lost Leader")
* Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day (1850)
* Men and Women (1855, "Love Among the Ruins", "Evelyn Hope", "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came", "Andrea del Sarto", "Fra Lippo Lippi", "A Toccata of Galuppi's")
* Dramatis Personæ (1864, "Rabbi ben Ezra", "Caliban upon Setebos")
* The Ring and the Book (1868–9)
* Balaustion's Adventure (1871)
* Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Saviour of Society (1871)
* Fifine at the Fair (1872)
* Red Cotton Night-Cap Country (1873)
* Aristophanes' Apology (1875)
* The Inn Album (1875)
* Pacchiarotto, and How He Worked in Distemper (1876)
* The Agamemnon of Aeschylus (1877)
* La Saisiaz and The Two Poets of Croisic (1878)
* Dramatic Idyls (1879, 1880)
* Jocoseria (1883)
* Ferishtah's Fancies (1884)
* Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in Their Day (1887)
* Asolando (1889)

Related|

* Browning Society
* Armstrong Browning Library, collections and papers
* Clasped Hands of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1853 sculpture)
* The Barretts of Wimpole Street
* 1934 film
* 1957 film
* Pied Piper of Hamelin

Family life|

* Elizabeth Barrett Browning (wife)
* Robert Barrett Browning (son)
* Casa Guidi

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