Fra Lippo Lippi

A flâneur, a purposely lost rambler, is how I like to characterize myself. I know that I hadn’t always been such; once I had worn my clothes tight-fitting and my shoes stiff and highly polished. But I had experienced some wonderful moments when I knew what it felt like to wear my clothes loose. But it was an all too brief summer and when it ended, so, too, did my sauntering; I returned once more to my tight-fitting wardrobe and stiff shoes. Sometimes, even Thoreau would complain that “it sometimes happens that I cannot easily shake off the village. The thought of some work will run in my head and I am not where my body is—I am out of my senses.” That is, though his body is walking his mind is bound too tight. There had been, of course, those times when my walk was no saunter: I had felt too encumbered and unfree, and I would discuss with my therapist the unsatisfactory experience and the sources for my anxieties. I learned a few things and sauntered more, and during some walks there would occur transcendent moments when the world and me were transformed. Thoreau says he thinks “not much of the actual . . . It is a sort of vomit in which the unclean love to wallow.” Whew! But no, HDT doesn’t avoid the actual—in a sense it was where he always started—but at times he could not transcend it.  I hold with Robert Browning’s Fra Lippo Lippi who says, “This world’s no blot for us/Nor blank; it means intensely, and means good—/To find its meaning is my meat and drink.” In a way this was Thoreau’s method.

Fra Lippo Lippi struck out from the staid, cautious style then in vogue in the art communities and developed the realist manner of painting though not without harsh critique and chastisement of his work from his clerical superiors. They would have had him paint the soul so that the people would forget the physical, their hard labor, their oppression and their poverty. His superiors scolded,  

Your business is not to catch men with show,

With homage to the perishable clay,

But lift them over it, ignore it all,

Make them forget there’s such a thing as flesh.

Your business is to paint the souls of men—

Lippi stressed that if he painted the world about him it would lead people to the soul. To lose the physical world was not the purpose to which art aspired. Art, Lippi believed, returned the world to us. In a conversation with a guard who had apprehended Lippi as he returned to the monastery after a night of ribaldry Lippi responded: 

For don’t you mark? We’re made so that we love

First when we see them painted, things that we have passed 

Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see;

And so they are better, painted—better to us

Which is the same thing. Art was given for that;

God gives us to help each other so,
Lending our minds out.

His art, Lippi asserted, should give people the world that they were too busy, too distracted or too oppressed to see. For Lippi art might be the invitation to saunter and to transcend. Art might be the impetus for the achievements of other freedoms as well, as Thoreau seemed to understand. Those who would so saunter would see the world’s meaning that they had not before been aware. They would find in the art what would scratch their itches and then come to apprehend soul. Indeed, Lippi’s art would provide them access to meaning and it would begin with the physical world. Art was not a distraction but a summons. Centuries later Bertold Brecht would hold that his theatre was meant to portray the world for his audience and not an opportunity to lose that world in the exhaustion of catharsis. He did not want his audiences to sit passively and forget themselves in a work’s story, Brecht wanted his plays to inspire his audience to think about and question the world they live in. 

Once I had believed that all I needed to know was that beauty was truth and truth beauty, but since then I had experienced and learned a great deal. I recognized that beauty was not an immanence within the object but appeared as an event. Beauty was a description of a feeling that arose in as a response to a relationship between the particular work of art, between anything experienced and the one experiencing it. And I considered that beauty occurred when an experienced tension in the work was felt, and beauty happened from the experience of the release of that felt tension. That release made possible moments of transcendence for the one experiencing the work. I have been listening for years to Leonard Bernstein’s recordings of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Beethoven’s symphony was one of the most beautiful works I have known, though I admit that I have experienced a great deal of beauty in my life. But every time I would hear that music he experienced beauty. He remembered Harvey Sachs’s description of the third movement of the Ninth that followed the difficult, turbulent, sometimes even violent images of the first two movements. He writes “ . . . the third [movement] tells us that we have both lost and won—that as aware human beings, we have no choice but to wade through the horror and anguish and then die, but that we are able, from time to time, to see beyond and soar above these facts and to understand just enough to be able to appreciate the beauty of being moral.” For me the third movement released the tensions that the first two movements had caused and it prepared for the magnificence of the final choral movement. Sachs’s words described transcendence, to recognize the tensions and to experience a resolution of them, to feel one’s itches and to scratch them. Then I knew beauty; then I had beauty. Yes, the experience of beauty scratched one’s itches. All experience of beauty in art—visual, aural, tactile, gastronomical, aromatical—what Lippi referred to as simple beauty, would be found in the quotidian and it was from there that transcendence would happen. 

I think I have searched in my life for beauty and now understand that its potential was present always with me. Walking down a dusty, noisy street today, I thought, yes, the experience of beauty and the source of transcendence comes from having faith in the seed. That within that seed there was a tree that would burst forth and in time flourish. Beauty was truth as Fra Lippo Lippi had asserted. “If you get simple beauty and naught else,” he says, “you get about the best thing God invents—/That’s somewhat; and you’ll find the soul you have missed/within yourself, when you return him thanks.” The awareness of the soul was not a permanent presence but a transitory happening in the experience of beauty. The soul was called into being by the experience of beauty. Transcendence he knew now was not to lose the world in abstraction; rather transcendence would be experienced when the world appeared with new perspective. The experience of beauty led him right back to the world, and he would give thanks by making available the experience of beauty for others.