Browning's View of Art, "Andrea del Sarto" and "Fra Lippo Lippi."

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Browning’s View of Art, “Andrea del Sarto” and “Fra Lippo Lippi.”

Browning was not half so interested in his age and its problems as Tennyson was, he deliberately chose to keep himself aloof from the conditions of his time. Other than social problems, his attention was captivated by a great variety of things. His interests were neither narrow nor insular, nor he sought to circumscribe his genius by confining his muse to the singing of the social, political and economic conditions of his age. He was interested in a wide variety of subjects and his poetry reveals him as a lover of art, psychology, philosophy, love, crime and a variety of other subjects. Though his basic interest was centered in human beings, the soul and its varied and multifarious phases, his poems like “Andrea del Sarto” and “Fra Lippo Lippi” testify his interest in art and painting. For Browning art is a form of praise, i.e., of religion. Art is for Browning the creation of life by the imitation of life without and within him.

Fra Lippo Lippi” and “Ardea del Sarto” are two substantial companion- pieces, admittedly creative achievements of very high order, great pieces of dramatic characterization. In both poems the blank verse is full of vitality and movement. In “Fra Lippo Lippi” it is rougher, as befits the rapid careless excited talk that makes up the poem and does not rise to the height of Browning’s genius in colloquial verse; in “Andrea del Sarto” the verse is more flexible and less colloquial, the poem being rather a meditation. Each poem has a human setting, most vividly drawn in Fra Lippo’s case the brilliant summary of his life history, in del Sarto’s the marital situation, coming to us through the painter’s half-tragic half-humorous hints. But the essential matter of both poems lies in the theories of art expressed by the two artists.

For Browning, the musician, the poet and the painter possess the capacity to do just this: reawaken us into a new consciousness of what his Fra Lippo Lippi calls “the beauty and the wonder and the power” of this world. Its “changes, surprises” staled by daily custom , become taken for granted until the artist enables men to see them suddenly afresh, with clear vision, as if for the first time. We are made, declares Lippo,

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                                                                        “so that we love

                     First when we see them painted, things we have passed

                     Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see;”

                                                               [Fra Lippo Lippi: Robert Browning]

Fra Lippo’s ideas are separable. He voices the gospel of realism. He scoffs at the way ...

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