This is the third post in a series. Read parts one and two.
We can see Browning leaping back-and-forth in another instance of the poem’s ongoing battle between word and image when love and music enter into the equation as purveyors of motion. Lippi sequesters himself in the Medici Palace to paint saints (image), but the lyrics (word) of the stornelli snake into his ears when he leans out the window, luring him out of his enclosure: “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!” The words of the music, in the terms of the art debates of the 1840s (DeLaura 378), draw him away from the soul and into the land of flesh.
If music and love bring movement and passion, religion brings boredom and stagnation. In this poem it moves Lippi away from his conception of art. He is enclosed in a house painting saints, and by repeating saints three times, Browning makes certain that we are as sick of saints as Lippi must be, all but uttering a grand “ouf” all our own. When Lippi cannot take it anymore, he puts his head out the window and hears music but also the words of the song. Indeed, before he even hears the music, he hears the “hurry of feet and little feet.”
When he describes the song, it is also in terms of motion. He listens to the “sweep of lute strings, laughs, and whifts of song/” Then when he hears the transporting tune, the tale it tells is one of love, another major animating factor of the poem: Flower o’ the broom, / Take away love, and our earth is a tomb! / Flower o’ the quince, / I let Lisa go, and what good is life since?” The song has lyrics, which are verbal, of course, which seems to give ascendancy to the verbal realm.
In a whimsical nod to this moment of linguistic preference the “saints, saints / And saints again” refers to Lippi’s painting “Seven Saints, Sacred Conversation,” which Lippi painted while staying at the Medici Palace (Woolford, Karlin and Phelan; my emphasis). In the “whifts of song” phrase, “whift” means “whiff or slight blast of wind, thereby associating the musical notes with the movement of the blowing wind, making it further mobile. Clearly, Lippi wants to take action.
Indeed, Browning demonstrates the full range of his character’s desire for movement by emphasizing an almost realist or naturalist (in the terms of the painting debate) sense of space. This is reminiscent of Lippi’s spatial description in which he catalogues the observations he makes in order to endure life on the streets as though he can reach into the barrel of his mind’s eye, or “store of remarks,” and pull out a face from the past to sketch.
This method of description is central to Lippi’s project because it describes theoretical space in such a way that it resembles physical space, which reflects Krieger’s ekphrastic thesis. Browning employs Lippi as the playing piece that can enact his own fantasies of the potential for a simultaneous spatial and temporal movement in poetry that Krieger implies is not possible.
This is part three, you can read part one here and part two here.