FRA LIPPO LIPPI, BROWNING'S NAUGHTY HIEROPHANT

By Joseph A. Dupras

FRA LIPPO LIPPI, by mixing insults with affability, indignation with deference, self-righteousness with self-pity, and impenitence with confession, avoids arrest and professional embarrassment for his sportive sexuality and Bohemian sensibilities. Attempting to change the guards' perceptions ("Zooks, what's to blame? you think you see a monk!" (vol. i, line 3) and win their sympathy, Lippo establishes a disarming fellowship of arrested development with them and identifies himself primarily as a painter from whom they should expect abnormal values. His clerical appearance falsifies his real character, which he insists they recognize so that their own blend of carnal sensations and immature artistic awareness will license his behavior. Lippo disrobes the "beast" (80) who cannot "subdue the flesh" (74), as he admits himself being, in hope that such creative stripteasing and sprezzatura will arrest the arresters. Fortunately for him, his auditors are susceptible enough to impulses of doing as one likes to disregard "the morality of [an] event [that] is indefensible" (Goldfarb 61); his methodical confirmation of them as his kindred souls undresses another spurious authority not enti- tled to enjoin his fleshliness. Moreover, the watch, being party to his ventures, vicariously satisfies a need to snatch a grace outside moral and social restraints, but imagined to be within art's reach. In awakening the police to greater artistic consciousness, Lippo tempts them with an idealized, barrierless profession partaking of holiness. He gains interpretive advantage by exploiting their naive- te, their torpor, and even their vain aspirations.

113 114 BROWNING INSTITUTE STUDIES However, what Lippo (with his boys-will-be-boys attitude) wants the night watch to notice differs from what Browning ex- pects readers with a greater ethical bent to apprehend, which David Sonstroem refers to as "a countervailing or moderating force to Lippo's mesmeric charm" (734). As Lippo becomes too familiar (even I'm already on a first-name basis with him), readers are perhaps not alert enough to his designs against interpretive accuracy and to his continued distortions of religious principles that fre- quently comprise the core of Browning's poetics. The monologue propagates an attractive but self-incriminating, naughty artistry that cannot gainsay moral accountability. Nevertheless, a reader who excessively tightens the interpretive screw against Lippo's life and art risks joining a homiletic alliance, the members of which, as Browning and Lippo know, are legion. "Fra Lippo Lippi," in typical Browning fashion, pushes even the most careful interpretive titans toward a dangerous, multifaceted hermeneutics; amusement, ethical standards, and critical privilege compete for our prized souls in a contest forcing us "to apprehend Lippo not only by sympathy, but also by judgment that does consider 'logical and moral correct- ness'" (Healy 58, quoting Langbaum 86). Browning's poem is so celebrated for its depiction of an artist's coming to maturity amid societal and religious prejudices that it has become one of those "things we have passed / Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see" (301-02). We demand more of ourselves as interpreters than Lippo demands of himself as (ir)religious painter only if we care to see an inherent sacrilegiousness in his imagination and artistry. He repudiates on justifiable artistic grounds a technique that does not respect accuracy and realism: Thus, yellow does for white When what you put for yellow's simply black, And any sort of meaning looks intense When all beside itself means and looks naught. (201-04) Nevertheless, he uses the same strategy himself to (dis)color moral issues of a conventionally black or white nature.1 Warning that context can distort the intensity of any meaning, the persona does become the poet's mouthpiece in calling for greater perceptiveness toward a knotty text, which can be made to seem "naught." An aesthetically-progressive reader will probably concur with Lippo BROWNING S NAUGHTY HIEROPHANT 11 5 about the shamefulness of "paint[ing] soul, by painting body / So ill" (199-200). But this same reader is prone to a moral achromatop- sia in adopting artistic spectacles that tend to distort shades of meaning in Browning's ethical spectrum. By identifying the world's "meaning" as exclusively sensual ("meat and drink," 314— 15), Lippo altogether annuls moral scruples, limits intensity and goodness to self-gratification, and vulgarizes "higher things" (309). His "hunger-pinch[ed]" (126) impulse to possess and reproduce such "meaning" conflates passion and genius. Restricting "higher things" to "the same truth" (309), that is, "simple beauty and naught else" (217), he turns even religious art into ethically "care- less" (294), obscene craftsmanship.2 The "soul" of his art is naturalism, infusing even a religious subject with physical inten- sity; the "soul" of his monologue is double entendre, making even an apology caustic and indecent. He revels in eroticism, assuming that such open defiance extenuates his profane artifices. Yet Browning determines Lippo's spiritual apostasy, dares to test "belief in a great moral purpose . . . and none of the lower incitements" as constitut- ing artistic excellence ("Essay on Shelley" 1: 1004), and challenges readers to rate the monologist's "grey beginning" (392) as the "neutral mood" of "a cheat" ("Essay on Shelley" 1005). Lippo rejects as simplistic the Prior's conventional notion of art as a morally potent medium because he sees the priesthood as still bogus or duplicitous, despite its access to spiritualized artistry, and sees Christianity's failure to uplift humankind — even "after the passion of a thousand years" (157). Since the cloister is a rat hole of carnality, Lippo appropriately "put[s] the front on it" (141) by indiscriminately portraying a gallery of rogues and clerics. The less inspiring his art is in terms of ethical worthiness, the more realisti- cally it represents the morally base Carmelites. Just as the art excludes moral service, so the artist reads religious subjects pro- fanely. Consequently, untroubled that his works do not "instigate to prayer" (316), Lippo reduces religious iconology to banalities: Strikes in the Prior: 'when your meaning's plain 'It does not say to folk — remember matins, 'Or, mind you fast next Friday!' Why, for this What need of art at all? A skull and bones, Two bits of stick nailed crosswise, or, what's best, A bell to chime the hour with, does as well. (317-22) Il6 BROWNING INSTITUTE STUDIES Whereas the Prior intends religious art to convey ethical doctrine directly and emphatically, Lippo would demystify moral norms to coincide with an artistry that just as reductively celebrates the sensations of a material soul that can afford not to hear the plainer meaning of Catholic practice. Both men are mistaken about iconographic technique, the former diminishing graphic precision, the latter inflating it. Despite the Prior's sexual hypocrisy and narrow perspective on "the mark of painting" (176), he hits the religious mark by identifying Lippo's art as "devil's-game / . . . catchfing] men with show, / With homage to the perishable clay" (178—80). Lippo, unlike Browning, believes he can "paint it all plain out,"3 sufficing the eye without saving the soul (see The Ring and the Book 12.863), because his creativity is disemburdening (144) to suit a world without moral encumbrances. Readers who still prefer his style, which approaches "soul" physiognomically, to the Prior's defunct medieval semiology remain virtually undisturbed that Lippo arrogantly would rather fry bigger fish than prepare the Lord's way. Other readers, either less morally lenient or more sensitive to Browning's conviction about good art having to arise from a "proper moral aim" ("Essay on Shelley" 1004), seem or- dained to experience a troubling moral/aesthetic affinity with Lippo (one similar to Browning's with Shelley, including the same oppor- tunities for whitewashing). As the monologue proceeds, Lippo's sentiments sorely test an upright reader's defense of a faith that should transcend corrupt institutions. Having already decided that meaning is only mundane and pri- vate, he easily disarms the worldly-wise guards by rationalizing away moral scruples and averting a horny dilemma. With sexually suggestive archetypes and rhetorical ploys, Lippo's apology ma- nipulates their unreconciled sensual and ethical concerns; as he "interprets] God" (311), he creates the Creator in his own image, blurs distinctions between conscience and convenience, and warps Scriptural lessons to fit sexual inferences: The old mill-horse, out at grass After hard years, throws up his stiffheels so, Although the miller does not preach to him The only good of grass is to make chaff. What would men have? Do they like grass or no - May they or mayn't they? all I want's the thing Settled for ever one way. As it is, BROWNING S NAUGHTY HIEROPHANT 117 You tell too many lies and hurt yourself: You don't like what you only like too much, You do like what, if given you at your word, You find abundantly detestable. For me, I think I speak as I was taught; I always see the garden and God there A-making man's wife: and, my lesson learned, The value and significance of flesh, I can't unlearn ten minutes afterwards. (254-69, my emphases) Whereas the police probably fail to grasp Lippo's Biblical allusion to grass (Isaiah 40:6) and perhaps his sexually symbolic use of the horse and miller, they surely appreciate the way he remorselessly favors indulgence, thus avoiding their psychosexual quandary (em- phasized anaphorically by "you"). He blasphemously transforms God's loving remedy for Adam's loneliness into sexual procure- ment.4 Furthermore, if they have any carnal knowledge, they would likely endorse his regard for gratified concupiscence. How could they not "understand" him and his bestiality (270) as he narrows the "value and significance of flesh" to erotic satisfaction? About all that he omits in this lustful "lesson" is the Renaissance equivalent of cigarette smoking when, "ten minutes afterwards," his passion is spent. Figuring that his bribe and intimidative name-dropping will get him off the hook with the civil authorities, and that his artistic adroitness releases him from responsibilities to the Prior, Lippo "plotfs] to make amends" (343) to the Church for his debauchery. However, his projected Coronation of the Virgin similarly accommo- dates an unabashed physicality and a shameless conscience that no religious order constrains. Consistent with his understanding of "higher things," his assumptions about sacralized celibacy are disre- spectful and salacious. He has already stressed Eve's engendering to establish a precedent for his own sexuality; this is the sophistic Lippo citing Scripture for his purpose. Similarly, in a travesty of divine procreation he incongruously and anachronistically links the translated, virginal Madonna with "her babe" (348). Therefore, both premier women become God's sex objects in Lippo's prurient transcribing of Christian tradition into a record of theopulation. Propagation of the faithful also includes the white faced, "bowery flowery angel-brood" (my emphasis); these angelic progeny and 11 8 BROWNING INSTITUTE STUDIES procreants cause him to digress bathetically to the perfumed "ladies [who] crowd to Church at midsummer" (349—52). Lippo's idea of the holy is a vulgar afterword to his own physical experience: "a face that looked up ... zooks, sir, flesh and blood, / That's all I'm made of!" (60-61). His reprisal is a religious art that prevents Church doctrine from etherealizing religious behaviour by mock- ing what Catholicism glamorizes or by exposing what it suppres- ses. Any expectation that the real painting has to be identical to Lippo's vision, which Browning constitutes, involves the same interpretive confusion of "live truth" and "dead truth" (The Ring and the Book 1.696—97) mocked in numerous poems as diverse as "Sibrandus Schafnaburgensis," "My Last Duchess," The Ring and the Book, and Balaustion's Adventure. By making a Renaissance wag's imagination more original, candid, and transgressive than his actual artistic product, Browning typically explores "the seed of act, / God holds appraising in His hollow palm" (The Ring and the Book 10.271-72). Yet Browning's double exposure of a poem with another art work signals his respect for the Lippo's (dis)figurings and parerga — resources of a "maker-see," even a morally flawed one. As the composition of the painting falls from the sublime to the ridiculous, Lippo hastens its figural destruction by maneuvering himself into it, putting himself in the flattering position of being both its creative beginning and thematic end. With mock disbelief and surprising ease he joins this "pure company" (368) from which his notorious sexual escapades should exclude him. By echoing his earlier reference to an impure "company" of mice and men (11), Lippo satirically implicates the heavenly host in parasitical lechery. Apparently having over-reached himself morally, Lippo faces judgment by "the celestial presence" (372), just as his sexual exces- ses have put him in a compromising civil corner from which he must defend himself. He does this by placing artistic creativity beyond good and evil. The "agent" of his "salvation" is not, as Herbert Tucker, Jr., suggests, "an angelic figure of his own crea- tion" (206), but rather someone "[l]ike the Prior's niece . . . Saint Lucy, [he] would say" (387). Using this light woman as the model for a saintly defense of his place in the picture, he discounts moral integrity in an artistic cause that never claims to sublimate his rebellious lust. The promiscuous niece's "good word for [Lippo] in the nick" (386) makes her his sexual and creative accomplice, turns Scriptural rule into venereal misrule, and "seems to prevent his BROWNING S NAUGHTY HIEROPHANT IIQ artistic head from ending up on a monastic platter" (Hackett 118). The Coronation of the Virgin cannot long remain a venerable subject as it projects Lippo's venery and becomes the crowning renuncia- tion of moral responsibility — an "apt word" (342) to escape spiritual judgment. Claiming to labor for a mountainous art, he bears mousy ethics. Happily believing that the "pure company" is as easily gulled as the night watch, thereby ensuring a heavenly life safe from moral arrest, Lippo easily moves from feigned moral propriety to mock artistic humility. "So, all smile—" (377) with a dashing, diabolically ambiguous stroke5 — he has a further opportunity to shatter the spectacle of heavenly continence. In the course of booby-trapping The Coronation of the Virgin he betrays his prurience through a simile that changes angelic reverence into a risque game. Neverthe- less, the painter, "Under the cover of a hundred wings / Thrown like a spread of kirtles when you're gay / And play hot cockles" (379—81), is caught with his pants down — both morally and poeti- cally. Lippo wrongly assumes that the "sweet angelic slip of a thing" (370) succeeds in stroking away hasty divine retribution, and that the holy ones "all smile" to see his work and to signify their tolerance; he thereby bares an ethical cynicism that complements a sexual recklessness. The more he tries to conceal himself, the more he reveals his damning artfulness. Lacking both personal and artis- tic integrity, he "compromises himself both as a man and as an artist" (Goldfarb 67). Tucker correctly notes that Lippo "paint[s] himself into a corner" (208) artistically, but any such corner is a moral/aesthetic function of Browning's larger picture of human accountability. Lippo's gamey figurative language is ethically cor- nering: "all the doors being shut" (381) cannot forestall a justly outraged, "hothead husband" from "unexpectedly]" reentering the marital picture to stop the cuckolding and wipe the smile from his face (382-83). The misconstrued "lesson" of Eve's inception eases what remains of Lippo's conscience and impresses the police; his burlesque Coronation of the Virgin even more defiantly and sac- rilegiously derides the Virgin birth and the bridal nature of the Church. Having daringly perverted "the good word" and secured a place, Lippo is as morally vulnerable to Christ's judgment ("Zooks," that is, God's "hooks")6 as the Apostles are under a similar circumstance of secretive infidelity and cowardice after the Crucifixion when they also shut their doors (John 20:19, 26). 120 BROWNING INSTITUTE STUDIES Readers of the poem also are on the hook to see through Lippo's chicanery, for if he reaches and secures "some safe bench behind" (384), his bunkoing art gains accomplices. Shelley saw such an art tearing the ethical fabric of society: "Obscenity, which is ever blasphemy against the divine beauty in life, becomes, from the very veil which it assumes, more active if less disgusting: it is a monster for which the corruption of society for ever brings forth new food, which it devours in secret" (491). The more "brother Lippo's do- ings, up and down, / You know them and they take you" (40-41), the less likely "you" are to recognize a character whom Pope Inno- cent, one of Browning's noblest spokesmen, denounces as "the man [who] proves irreligiousest / Of all mankind, religion's para- site!" (The Ring and the Book 10.452-53). Nevertheless, readers who stop smiling at Lippo's monstrosity finally choose between Lippo's quaint Venusian love and "the best thing God invents" (218) - whatever that is. Never "careless what comes of it" (294), our own hierophantic activity continually proves "How very hard it is to be / A Christian!" (Easter-Day 1-2). Apparently, even as literary interpreters, "we must work out our own salvation" (Healy 75). The police lose their catch, and Lippo's pseudo-penitential Coro- nation of the Virgin will probably suit the nuns' conventional aesthet- ics, but an artist - despite his best laid plans - is nonetheless caught in a net of responsibility to a higher moral law: as Browning remarks in a letter to Ruskin, "A poet's affair is with God, - to whom he is accountable, and of whom is his reward ..." (Col- lingwood 166). Lippo's affairs lie elsewhere and include a profession more ancient than his own; if love is "the best thing God invents," the painter's sexual outlook, unshared by Browning (Lammers 22), and his excesses of the flesh further manifest "his betrayal of art" (Goldfarb 64). Although he gets off the hook with both the night watch and his religious superiors, Lippo miscalculates his social, artistic, and ethical position. Browning alludes to Horace's utpictura poesis standards and portrays Lippo as a cornered figure to elucidate the character's anti-Promethean - even Luciferian - traits; he "loves a dark corner, [not] desir[ing] to be seen in a strong light..." ("Art of Poetry" 73).7 Despite his final assurance to the night watch ("Don't fear me!" 392), Browning's ambiguous creature does rep- resent someone to fear. Apprehending him, even belatedly, has surprising consequences wherever sacramentalism differs from hip- BROWNING S NAUGHTY HIEROPHANT 121 to-haunch sacrwmentalism. A "critic's keenest taste" (Horace 73) in sampling Browning's creative love for "forbidden meanings" (Tucker 52) would hold Lippo and his works up to the light - despite the painter's call for "no lights, no lights!" (390) - and would not let any truth slip. "Fra Lippo Lippi" is a more pungent specimen of Browning's moral artistry for readers who have, be- sides the watchman's twinkling eye and shaking head (42, 76), sharper and, perhaps, even longer noses for his genial designs. Nevertheless, neither a higher fancy nor a lower one quite sets things perfectly straight in the poem. The pleasure of this text resides in the perpetual twilight of interpretive gods, in the (always already) gray beginnings when we, like Lippo, anxiously see some light.

NOTES 1. Cf. "Never again elude the choice The verb "make" enters mating-game of tints! / White shall not neutralise the parlance in the fifteenth century, and black, nor good / Compensate bad in Shakespeare on occasion uses it this man, absolve him so: / Life's business way (for example, The Taming of the being just the terrible choice" (The Ring Shrew 2.1.201; Romeo and Juliet 1.2.12- and the Book 10.1234-37). 13; Twelfth Night 3.4.57-59; King Lear 2. The subject of devotion to mun- 1.1.22). dane pleasures appears just as conspicu- 5. Instead of ending line 377 with a ously in Easter-Day, "Saul," and "Rabbi comma or a semicolon, to make "all" Ben Ezra," which are usually consid- either an adjective or a noun, respec- ered among Browning's most explicit tively, Browning uses a dash. This formulations of his personal religious punctuation, to which the listening beliefs, and which take a position about night watch would not be sensitive, the relation of body to soul that is quite allows Browning to display Lippo's foreign to the one Lippo espouses. equivocation and to unsettle determi- 3. Browning, using this phrase in a nate readings of both heaven's mood letter to John Ruskin, written 10 De- and Lippo's. The most curious thing cember 1855, registers the limits of his about either the "pure company" or the poetry as a graphic art (quoted in Col- impure painter being "all smile" is the lingwood [164]). prematurity of deciding meaning in 4. Lippo infers from the Bible that such a giddy wonderland. woman's prototypical indentity is only 6. "Zooks," Lippo's most common being anonymously "man's wife." expletive, is a contracted form of gad- Moreover, if his wanton imagination zooks (itself a euphemistic corruption considers God a pimp, his Renaissance of gadso 'penis,' a variant of catso from breeding might also permit him to in- Italian cazzo, according to Farmer and sinuate more audaciously that the deity Henley, the OED, and Partridge). This sets the foremost example of droit du subconscious, subtle union of the seigneur by making a woman of Eve. bawdy and the benign reflects a link 122 BROWNING INSTITUTE STUDIES between Lippo's potency (as one of the (most, appropriately, contracted). boys) and his peril before God's rod. In 7. Browning at the age of twelve a similarly subtle linguistic vein, received a translation of Horace from Browning both stresses colloquialism his Uncle Reuben (Griffin and Minchin and embeds Lippo's phallicism by hav- 6). ing the painter frequently use copulas

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