Fra Lippo Lippi

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1855

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Symbols & Motifs

Animal Imagery

In the poem, the motif of animal imagery is often connected by Fra Lippo Lippi with sin. Animals or animal-like humans are mentioned particularly to discuss sexuality. Lippo calls himself a “beast” twice (Lines 80, 270). He is caught by the guards like a “pilchar[d]” (Line 23)—a small fish of the herring family—in their sweep of the city’s sex district. He compares the “sportive ladies” (Line 6) to mice, with himself being a potential “rat” (Line 9) who “nips each” (Line 10). Later, he describes one of the attractive revelers, as a “rabbi[t] by moonlight” (Line 59), an animal long connected with sexual promiscuity. He also compares himself to an “old mill-horse” (Line 254) finally let out to frolic in the grass, which is why he “play[s] the fooleries you catch me at” (Line 253).

All of this shows that Fra Lippo Lippi understands enjoying sensation is not the act of a holy man. At the same time, he tries to justify this by explaining that his need for sensation comes out of deprivation and being forced to renounce the world in order to survive. One of Fra Lippo Lippi’s earliest memories is that, as a starving child, he learned “which dog bites, which lets drop / His bone from the heap of offal in the street” (Lines 122-23). His “hunger-pitch” (Line 126) makes his ability to observe even keener. If he is indeed an animal, Fra Lippo Lippi suggests, it is because he was treated so from the beginning.

Flesh of My Flesh

While talking about painting idealized figures, Fra Lippo Lippi makes an important note about the Bible:

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 (Lines 266-69).

In other words, while the Prior and the learned men preach that it is necessary to “paint the soul, never mind the legs and arms” (Line 193), Fra Lippo Lippi can only see the flesh’s necessity. He goes back to God’s creation of Eve from Adam’s rib, and the lines that Adam utters, “This is now bone of my bones / and flesh of my flesh” (King James Bible, Genesis 2:23). The passage continues, stating that man “shall cleave to his wife and they shall be one flesh […] they were both naked, the man and his wife, and not ashamed” (Genesis 2:24-25). For Fra Lippo Lippi, the passage symbolizes communion and lack of shame when dealing with the flesh. Therefore, the philosophy of idealized art that refuses to recognize the body is, for Fra Lippo Lippi, both physically and spiritually untrue.

The Angelic Slip of a Thing

Besides being Fra Lippo Lippi’s artistic savior, the “sweet angelic slip of a thing” (Line 370) at the end can be tied to several corporeal women in the poem, creating a motif of an angelic but sexual creature. She is “like the Prior’s niece” (Line 386), who appears in Fra Lippo Lippi earliest fresco, and might also be his mistress. She could also be reminiscent of one of the female revelers who comes on “little feet” (Line 52), laughing under Fra Lippo Lippi’s window “[l]ike the skipping of rabbits by moonlight” (Line 60). Or the “little lily thing” (Line 385) may echo a “sportive lad[y]” (Line 6) who is also symbolized as a “wee white mouse” (Line 10). Fra Lippo Lippi later describes being under the angel’s wings “play[ing] hot cockles, all the doors being shut” (Line 381), a euphemism for sex.

Finally, Fra Lippo Lippi compares this figure to “Saint Lucy” (Line 387), patron saint of the blind, who in Dante Alighieri’s Purgatorio carries the main character out of darkness into the dawn of a new day. The historic Fra Lippo Lippi fell in love with—to great scandal—Lucrezia Buti, whose name is a variant of Lucy (See: Background). She served as his model for both the Madonna in his painting of Madonna and Child as well as Salome in the Stories of St. John the Baptist, both painted between 1450 and 1465. Regardless of who she represents, the figure serves to symbolize the link between the earthly and the divine.