This is Part Five of a series. Read parts one, two, three, and four.
Ultimately, the brawl between the seen and the said that goes on in the poem causes Browning to arm himself by rewriting art history. That is, in his attempt to create an ekphrastic poem that has the strengths of both poetry and painting, he does not merely play writer; he plays rewriter of painted history. He does this by inventing works of art that Lippi never created (his painting of St. Laurence described in line 323, for one) and even using his words to “paint” over what Lippi has already brushed. DeLaura frames it in the following way:
Browning—absorbed in re-creating the man, and working out his own argument—has misleadingly transferred the hypervitality of his fictionalized raffish monk to the artwork. Modern editors correctly assume that the rollicking scene at the end is meant for Lippo’s Incoronazione di Maria [The Coronation of the Virgin] (which Browning would have known at the Uffizi Gallery), but this solemn, almost static painting, like the rest of LIppo’s art, is quite different from what Browning suggests…Browning’s voluble speaker and that bustling scene have made it difficult for us to see Lippo’s work and describe it accurately.
Furthermore, Browning rewrites Lippi’s patron as Lippi in The Coronation of the Virgin, attributing to what Browning refers to as Lippi’s self portrait the phrase, “iste perfectic opus” or “this man caused the work to be done.” Browning seems to be saying, too, that it is he who allowed this work to be made. Yet this does not mean that we cannot feel a longing for the peculiar abilities given to the painter and not to the writer, hence the existence of his painting poems in the first place. They are about the desire for transcendent artistic expression and the foiling of that desire by the limitations of art.
Finally, this unavoidable shortcoming of artistic representation spurs Browning to hybrid visual-verbal art but also to play God to an extent, creatively speaking. In one passage Lippi claims that painting has the power to make someone see something for the first time, or to make someone see something as love-worthy for the first time.
For, don’t you mark? we’re made so that we love
First when we see them painted, things we have passed
Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see;
And so they are better, painted–better to us,
Which is the same thing. Art was given for that;
God uses us to help each other so,
Lending our minds out. Have you noticed, now,
Your cullion’s hanging face? A bit of chalk,
And trust me but you should, though! How much more,
If I drew higher things with the same truth!
That were to take the Prior’s pulpit-place,
Interpret God to all of you! Oh, oh.
This portion of the poem assigns a tremendous amount of power to visual art, and this power also seems to extend to written art. Writing, too, can mimic a thing of the world to the extent that we finally see, and maybe even fall in love with, it. Thus, when Browning inserts this commentary into the mouth of his invented Lippi, he is also commenting on his own powers of mimesis that he uses in constructing this speaker.
Lippi even goes so far as to say that the painted thing is better than the real thing. He gives all possible power to subjectivity and art by saying that what’s better to us, because now that it is painted we can see and appreciate it, is better in general. We can apply this to Browning’s art as well and say that words can show us (paint a verbal picture) something that we may not have seen or things that we have seen but not been greatly pleased by.
Lippi takes it a step further by saying that God gave us art so that we could show each other the things of the world with it. Another hubristic statement comes from Lippi (and perhaps Browning as well) when he says that his way of seeing that he lends out through his art is God’s gift to humans. In this model, Browning’s readers will love what he shows them through his writing (both things in nature and works of art), elevating him to the level of one who can “lend” his mind out, “interpret God” to his readers.
This desire echoes the one behind Browning’s aesthetic project: No matter how many times the Prior asks Lippi to, “Paint the soul, never mind the legs and arms!”, he continues to emphasize the parts of a person that allow him to go around observing his world and then painting and writing about it, straining always towards that Holy Grail, artistic expression.
This is Part Five. You can read Part One here, Part Two here, Part Three here, and Part Four here.