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Name: Sarah Omar Mphil: Term paper British Poetry Professor: Sir Shafaat Yar Khan

Humanism and The Renaissance Attitude in Brownings Poems: Andrea Del Sarto, And Fra Lippo Lippi
Robert Brownings interest in Renaissance is natural, when we view his biography. His father was at heart a scholar, an artist, a collector of books and pictures. The six thousand volumes in his library included important works in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, French, Spanish, and Italian that the young poet read. Like his own Paracelsus, Browning desired to know," and this avid search, coupled with his own keen zest for life--"HOW good is man's life, the mere living"-reveals his nature almost as a Renaissance figure himself. As we go back to the timeline of the initiation of the Renaissance, in the late fourteenth century the period of awakening began in Europe which is known as the Renaissance. It began so gradually that at first it was a movement hardly perceptible; but with the fall of Constantinople in 1453 the last vestige of the old world was swept away and Europe was plunged into a new age, an age of expansion, of discovery, of enlarged literary and artistic activity. The Renaissance was not merely a revival of learning, the discovery of ancient manuscripts, or the finding of new worlds. It was the new spirit of freedom, of intellectual energy, of joy and exultation which began to manifest itself in the people of Europe, which was the essence of the new age. It was this spirit which impelled men to make use of the material which they found at hand; it was this new intelligence which prompted the discovery of the physical world and the conquest of the

human mind and its potentialities. It was natural that the new movement should begin in Italy and fitting that it should be built upon the ruins of the greatest of empires. For, at a time when the other nations of Europe were still at a primary state of advancement, Italy already had one of the oldest and most cultured civilizations of the world. It [Italy] possessed language, political freedom, and commercial prosperity, which were buried with the fall of the Roman Empire only to come forth with greater brilliance in the Renaissance. With the discovery of the physical world came also the discovery of man or the development of his finer nature. This phase of activity found expression in three channelsart, literature, and scholarship. Italy was supreme in painting and sculpture. Art, during the Middle Ages, had become definitely associated with the church, as Brownings Fra Lippo Lippi portrays. Artists busied themselves only with pictures of the saints and were concerned merely with portraying beauty of soul. There was no attempt to give beauty a form and structure in a work of art. But with the coming of the Renaissance, the new spirit extended also to arts. Painters even began to realize that a symbolic meaning could not be portrayed in a painting. They [the artists] were able to appreciate the beauty and perfection of the physical form of beauty they saw and felt and to tried to reproduce it in their work. According to a critic, Jayanta Bhattacharya, Brownings mastery is superbly explicit in some great poems like, Fra Lippo Lippi, Andrea Del Sarto These dramatic monologues are related to painters and paintings.(Bhattcharya 20)This indicates as G. Robert Stange concludes that "primarily Browning is praising a Renaissance humanist for devoting his whole soul to the complete fulfillment of a high purpose, namely, the absolute mastery of ancient literature as a key to wise living (such an aim would rightly include the necessity to understand the most subtle

points of grammar) and for the faith that what he cannot accomplish here will be achieved in heaven." (Stange A Proposal for Settling the Grammarian Estate) In Florence he [Browning] was able to live in the very atmosphere of the Renaissance artists. There were the same narrow streets, the same little shops where the masters had worked. He lived almost in the shadow of near-by were the workshops of Andrea Del Sarto and Fra Lippo Lippi. He went to see the churches and the palaces; in the museums he studied day after day the works of Raphael, da Vinci, and the others. With his interest in painting came also a less sustained attraction for architecture and sculpture. In the great art poems, Old Pictures in Florence, Fra Lippo Lippi, Andrea Del Sarto, the intense study of Renaissance art is notable. It was the art of the Renaissance which appealed most strongly to Browning. Indeed, the intensive study is reflected markedly in his work. It is then to the great dramatic monologue, Fra Lippo Lippi, that is firstly considered a part of the Renaissance figures. Very probably it was from Vasarl's Lives of the Painters that Browning first read the romantic story of Fra Lippo Lippi and conceived the idea of mankind, the Carmelite monk being the principal character of his poem. Fra Lippo Lippi was not only a great painter of the age, but he represented also the typical churchman of the time and the more or less unholiness of those who professed holy orders. Fra Lippo Lippi was part of the Renaissance. The old monk was a servant of the beliefs and ideals of the church which shaped both his personality and art. He painted "under the eye of God." Thinking that physical beauty detracted from the spiritual, he and his brother monks painted their "Madonnas with no limbs beneath their robes." Their art was essentially religious at a time when religion and art were beginning to be separated. So they were really unknown painters, working in the seclusion of the monastery, while Fra Lippo Lippi and the other painters of the new age were putting into their pictures the spirit and energy which they

felt. Fra Lippo Lippi was brought into the religious order as a child, He showed a talent for drawing at an early age, and the fathers believed that he might decorate their church, and allowed him to continue with his work. But Lippo Lippi had new conceptions of art and a touch of realism in his nature which would not let him follow the instructions of the monks under whom he worked. And they, seeing the beautiful, life-like bodies which he gave his saints, were alarmed and told him to not paint the body but rather he should have painted the soul because they said, Your business is to paint the souls of men."' However, Fra Lippo was unconvinced. To him [Browning] and [Fra Lippo Lippi], art was not art without beauty; in the words of Keats, he believed that "Beauty is truth, and truth is beauty." But he [Fra Lippo Lippi] went even deeper, and there in the palace of the Medici, being forced to paint saints according to the medieval conception, he became convinced that "All is beauty: And knowing this, is love, and love is duty." Fra Lippo was not a dissolute friar; he was simply breaking away from the narrow limits of the Middle Ages and asserting his individuality, a trait which was characteristic of the Renaissance. He was a human being and a personality--not a slave of the religious principles. His soul vibrated with the new energy and freedom which came with the awakening. He found life interesting, and his own was "a joyous apology for realism and the physical life. Fra Lippo was aware of "The beauty and the wonder, and the power .The shapes of things, their colors, lights and shades. Changes, surprises," and knew that God made them all. There is indeed, a Bohemian streak in his nature that made the bright lights, the sound of music and dancing, and the sight of pretty faces irresistible. It was this zest for life that impelled him, unable to endure the restraint of being shut up in the palace of Cosimo de Medici. He let himself out of his [Medici] window for a frolic in the

street below."Here's spring come, and the nights one makes up bands, to roam the town and sing out carnival."He was the man who found life good, who recognized the "dear fleshly perfection of the human shape," who made angels out of street urchins and portraits of his peasant loves for his virgins and saints; this was the great figure of the Renaissance who could say."This world's no blot for us. Nor blank; it means intensely, and means good."'' In Vasarls Lives of the Painters, Browning also read the life of Andrea del Sarto, and on the bare historical facts which he found recorded there, he framed his other street art poem. Touched by the genius of Browning, Andrea, too, became a great Renaissance figure. There is no pathetic picture anymore in literature than this one of a man who might "have dwelt on the mountain tops but who allowed the plains to suffice. Andrea del Sarto is an example of the skillful artist without a soul. He was called the "faultless painter," and his fellow artists envied his sure hand and perfect technique. Andrea himself realized his ability, but he also knew his weakness "All is silver-gray, Placid and perfect with my art: the worse I. The subject of artistic perfection was for Browning a source of prejudice. "Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp. Or what's a heaven for?"Andrea Del Sarto achieved almost perfect technique; he could correct lines and strokes of Raphael and Michael Angelo. "You don't know how the others strive; To paint a little thing like that you smeared Carelessly passing with your robes afloat."The tragedy was that he could not give his pictures a soul. Speaking of great artists like Raphael, he said,"But themselves, I know reach many a time a heaven that's shut to me.""Browning makes it clear that Andrea failed not because of the vain, unfaithful woman who was his wife. The fault lay within him, for he was a man wholly without character. In Andrea Del Sarto, Browning presents a portrayal of the artist as one who is born an artist, one who is created in order to create. He presents the ideal of an artist as being more than

an occupation of making art, but as being an identity and destiny. As if I saw alike my work and self/ And all that I was born to be and do The view that creating art is innate to him is implied through the naturalness of his art. He says, I can do with my pencil what I know,/ What I see, what at bottom of my heart/ I wish for He feels that to create art is something that comes innately from within himself. He is not motivated to create by any external forces, only by what he feels intuitively from looking inward. He also seems to argue that this makes him a more authentic kind of artist because it is in his nature and because he is unaffected by criticism. He states, I, painting from myself and to myself,/ Know what I do, am unmoved by mens blame/ Or their praise either. References Bhattacharya, Jayanta.Browning and His Poems on Art. Studies in Literature. New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers and Distributers.2004. Web Monterio, George. A Proposal for Settling the Grammarian's Estate. Victorian Poetry and Poetics, ed. Walter E. Houghton and G. Robert Stange (Boston, 1959), p.253n.27th Oct,2011.Web. 19th Oct, 2013