The relation of art to life--art being the
teacher that makes us understand life--is perfectly well understood
by Fra Lippo Lippi.
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.
If one stands to-day in the Ancient and Modern Gallery in Florence,
and contemplates Fra Lippo Lippi's masterpiece, _The Coronation of
the Virgin_, and reads the lines about it in this poem, one will get
a new idea of the picture. It is a representation of the painter's
whole nature, half genius, half mucker--the painting is a glory of
form and color, and then in the corner the artist had the assurance
to place himself in his monk's dress among the saints and angels,
where he looks as much out of place as a Bowery Boy in a Fifth
Avenue drawing-room. Not content with putting himself in the picture,
he stuck a Latin tag on himself, which means, "This fellow did the
job."
Browning loves Fra Lippo Lippi, in spite of the man's impudence and
debauchery; because the painter loved life, had a tremendous zest
for it, and was not ashamed of his enthusiasm.
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