This is Part Two. You can read Part One here.
Any marriage of the visual and verbal in poetry contains its share of arguments. This struggle between the painted and the written can be seen throughout “Fra Lippo Lippi.” By the same token, Starzyk sees ekphrasis as a kind of battle between the seen and said, a “Contest between word and image, the simultaneous struggle to empower what is mute and to enforce the image’s silence.”
Thus, if ekphrasis necessarily includes some element of struggle between the visual and the verbal, this scuffle can certainly be seen in Lippi’s reaction to the guards who give him trouble in the beginning of the poem:
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.
Lippi can take revenge on one of the henchmen who manhandled him by punishing him with his words: he linguistically transforms him into the slave that brandishes John the Baptist’s head after its removal. Lippi paints a verbal painting and, because it is made out of words and not paint, he can then make it speak (as in the case where he has a voice utter “Look you, now” as can never happen in a painting).
This section touches on the shortcomings of both media that Browning interweaves in this poem: painting and writing. Although Lippi does execute that image in real life — Lippi painted just such a likeness in the Duomo at Prato (Woolford, Karlin and Phelan) — in the reality of this poem he has not done so yet, and in this way we see the weakness of words. It’s not “our chance to have a bit of chalk,/ A wood-coal or the like,” and therefore he cannot show us, we cannot see.
We can only read about it and formulate our own image in our mind’s eye; however, this holds a power all its own because when available to everyone’s eyes a work of art can only look a certain way, but when visible only in one’s mind’s eye, the possibilities are endless.
That Browning, a man who can write but not paint, chose to write a poem whose title character is a man who can paint but not write points not only to the infuriating limitation of any art to express the whole of life, but also to Browning’s attempt to fuse word and image in such a way as to, if not overcome this limitation (for that would be impossible), at least address it in a significant way.
In other words, if the chasm between word and image and what one desires to express and what one ends up expressing cannot be bridged, Browning can, at the very least, take leaps of faith between the two poles.
Read part three.