BROWNING'S ITALY (24 page)

On the whole it will be seen, that the souls of these early painters have been far from wronged so terribly as Browning implies. All the greatest art students and critics have given them a meed of praise far more en-thusiastic than any note of praise Struck in the poem. Yet the poet's mood is under-standable. He was overwhelmed by the ap-pearance of neglect, the whitewashings, the removals, the paintings over, the fadings out that many of these early pictures have suffered, not at the hands of the art-lovers of later days, but at the hands of the unappre-

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ciative who were either too near or too blind or too bigoted to realize their value.

While this poem may stand for the point of view of a modern man looking back at the early art, in the remaining poems the reader is introduced to the painters themselves, and made to see in a remarkable manner the peculiar individuality of each artist described.

The poet has chosen to portray three types in this way. Fra Lippo Lippi, who Stands for the break into realism and secularism, marking one phase of the developing Renaissance; "Andrea del Sarto," who Stands for the calm after the flood-tide of development had been reached; and "Pictor Ignotus," who perhaps Stands for a mood which means the outflow of the tide, the decay of the creative impulse through the development of too great self-consciousness.

In "Fra Lippo Lippi," the poet has por-trayed one scene in his life, and through the talk of the painter has revealed what manner of man he was according to Vasari's account of him.

This painter-poet was born in Florence, 1406, in a by-street, called Ardiglione, be-hind the convent of the Carmelites. His mother died shortly after his birth and his father two years later so that he was left in

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the care of his father's sister, Mona Lapaccia. She managed to look out for him until his eighth year, when she placed him with the Carmelites.

He proved a very poor scholar as far as learning was concerned, but showed such a remarkable talent for drawing that the prior very sensibly decided to give him every oppor-tunity to learn. What eise could be done with a little chap who in place of studying never did anything but daub his books and those of the other boys with caricatures? The poet enlivens this fact by making Fra Lippo add arms and legs to the notes in his music books.

He went daily into the chapel of the Car-mine, which had recently been painted with very beautiful frescos by Masaccio, and there he continually practised along with the other youths who were always studying them, so that when still a child he did some really marvelous work. He soon came to paint pictures after the style of Masaccio so well that many affirmed that the spirit of Masaccio had entered into him. At seventeen he decided to leave the convent and become a painter, through not ceasing to be a friar.

There is a story to the effect that he was once taken captive by a Moorish galley and

carried off to Barbary, but was freed by his master upon his drawing a wonderful portrait of the Moor, with a piece of charcoal which he took from the fire. He had the good for-tune to secure the friendship and patronage of Cosimo de' Medici. A story told in con-nection with his painting for Cosimo is made the central event of the poem.

"It is said that Fra Lippo Lippi was much addicted to the pleasures of sense, insomuch that he would give all he possessed to secure the gratification of whatever inclination might at the moment be predominant, but if he could by no means accomplish his wishes, he would then depict the object which had attracted his attention. It was known that, while occupied in the pursuit of his pleasures, the works undertaken by him received little or none of his attention; for which reason Cosimo de' Medici wishing him to execute a work in his own palace, shut him up that he might not waste his time in running about, but having endured this confinement for two days, he then made ropes with the sheets of his bed, which he cut to pieces for that pur-pose, and so having let himself down from the window, escaped, and for several days gave himself up to his amusements. When Cosimo found that the painter had dis-

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appeared he caused him to be sought, and Fra Lippo at last returned to work, but from that time forth Cosimo gave him liberty to go in and out at his pleasure, repenting greatly of having shut him up, when he considered the danger that Lippo had run by his folly in descending from the window; and ever afterwards laboring to keep him to his work by kindness only, he was by this means much more promptly and effectually served by the painter and was wont to say that excellencies of rare genius were as forms of light and not beasts of bürden."

The Coronation of the Virgin, described at the end of the poem, was according to Vasari, the picture which made Lippo Lippi known to Cosimo de' Medici, but it has been shown on other authority that this picture was executed long after Cosimo first knew Lippo Lippi, so Browning is justified in imagining it a kind of a penance picture for the escapade described. It has been said that the woman with the children in the f oreground in this picture is either Spinetta or Lucrezia Buti, but at the time they were both small children.

One of these, Lucrezia, was the beautiful girl with whom Lippo feil in love at the Convent of Santa Margherita in Prato. He

asked the nuns to allow him to use her for the model of the Virgin in the picture he was painting for them for the high altar. They consented and the result was that he carried her off from the convent. The nuns feit deeply disgraced and the father was out-raged, but Lucrezia could not be prevailed upon to return. She became the mother of the famous painter Filippino Lippi, and it is said that Lippo and Lucrezia were afterwards granted a dispei*ation of marriage from the Pope. It is evidently to her that Lippo refers as "a sweet angehe slip of a thing" in the poem.

All these events are woven into the poem, and life-likeness is given to the scene by its dramatic form and the introduetion of the guard and of the girls singing the fascinating little flower songs, — the Stornelli, — which the Italians at that time used to improvise with the greatest ease. The criticism which Browning puts into the mouths of the monks, who objeeted to his eminently human por-traitures of sacred subjeets does not seem to be justified by Vasari's aecounts of the way in which his work was reeeived. Symonds, among modern critics, comes the nearest to voieing their objeetions when he says, "Bound down to sacred subjeets, he was too apt to

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make angels out of street urchins and to paint the portraits of peasant-loves for Virgins. His delicate sense of natural beauty gave peculiar charm to this false treatment of religious themes. Nothing, for example, can be more attractive than the rows of angels bearing lilies in his 'Coronation of the Virgin; * and yet, when we regard them closely, we find that they have no celestial quality of form or feature."

It is this very fact of an intense quality of human sympathy that commends him to others aifd makes him a most important factor in the development of art.

Lafenestre speaks of the warm expansion of sympathy with which he brought the human type into art, in exchange for the con-ventional type which had been called divine, making Madonna a real mother of a real baby, and giving to sacred personages, with-out scruple and without coarseness, the fea-tures of living men and women. In the midst of a grave severe school he sounds a joyous note, which is the first utterance of modern painting.

"He often sacrifices precision to vivacity and variety, caring more about expression than pure form and falling frequently into a mannerism shown in his flattened and widened

skulls and broad faces, but conquering his audience of the fifteenth as of the nineteenth Century by his unaffected sincerity and his joyous realism. As he had humanized Madonna he domesticated art, reducing the altar piece to the genre picture."

How well the poet has shown his qualities as an artist in conjunction with his qualities as a man the poem itself can best illusträte:

FRA LIPPO LIPPI

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?

The Carmine's my cloister: hunt it up,

Do, — harry out, if you must show your zeal,

Whatever rat, there, haps on his wrong hole,

And nip each softling of a wee white mouse,

Wehe, wehe, that's crept to keep him Company,

Aha, you know your betters! Then, you'11 take

Your hand away that's fiddling on my throat,

And please to know me likewise. 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. Boh! you were best!

Remember and teil me, the day you're hanged,

How you affected such a gullet's-gripe!

But you, sir, it concerns you that your knaves

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Pick up a manner nor discredit you:

Zooks, are we pilchards, that they sweep the streets

And count fair prize what comes into their net ?

He's Judas to a tittle, that man is!

Just such a face! Why, sir, you make amends.

Lord, I'm not angry! Bid your hangdogs go

Drink out this quarter-florin to the health

Of the munificent House that harbors me

(And many more beside, lads! more beside!)

And all's come Square again. 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 ("Look you, now," as who should say)

And his weapon in the other, yet unwiped!

It's not your chance to have a bit of chalk,

A wood-coal or the like ? or you should see!

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 —

Teil you, I liked your looks at very first.

Let's sit and set things straight now, hip to haunch.

Here's spring come, and the nights one makes up bands

To roam the town and sing out carnival,

And I've been three weeks shut within my mew,

A-painting for the great man, saints and saints

And saints again. I could not paint all night —

Ouf! I leaned out of window for fresh air.

There came a hurry of feet and little feet,

A sweep of lute-strings, laughs, and whifts of song, —

Flower o' the broom,

Take away love, and our earth is a tombl

/ let Lisa go, and what good in life sincef

Flower o 9 the thyme — and so on. Round they went.

Scarce had they turaed the coraer when a titter

Lake 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 alter them. I came up with the fun Hard by Saint Laurence, hail fellow, well met, — Flower o' the rose,

If Vve beert merry, what matter who Jcnows ? And so as I was stealing back again To get to bed and have a bit of sleep Ere I rise up to-morrow and go work On Jerome knocking at his poor old breast With his great round stone to subdue the flesh, You snap me of the sudden. Ah, I see! Though your eye twinkles still, you shake your head — Mine's shaved — a monk, you say — the sting's in that! If Master Cosimo announced himself, Mum's the word naturally; but a monk! Come, what am I a beast for? teil us, now! 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,

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(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 mouthfulof bread ?"thoughtI;

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

I did renounce the world, its pride and greed,

Palace, farm, villa, shop, and banking-house,

Trash, such as these poor devils of Medici