Fra Lippo Lippi, Browning's Naughty Hierophant

Fra Lippo Lippi, by mixing insults with affability, indignation with deference, self-righteousness with self-pity, and impenitence with confession, avoids arrest and professional embarrassment for his sportive sexuality and Bohemian sensibilities. Attempting to change the guards' perceptions (“Zooks, what's to blame? you think you see a monk!”) (vol. I, line 3) and win their sympathy, Lippo establishes a disarming fellowship of arrested development with them and identifies himself primarily as a painter from whom they should expect abnormal values. His clerical appearance falsifies his real character, which he insists they recognize so that their own blend of carnal sensations and immature artistic awareness will license his behavior. Lippo disrobes the “beast” (80) who cannot “subdue the flesh” (74), as he admits himself being, in hope that such creative stripteasing and sprezzatura will arrest the arresters. Fortunately for him, his auditors are susceptible enough to impulses of doing as one likes to disregard “the morality of [an] event [that] is indefensible” (Goldfarb 61); his methodical confirmation of them as his kindred souls undresses another spurious authority not entitled to enjoin his fleshliness. Moreover, the watch, being party to his ventures, vicariously satisfies a need to snatch a grace outside moral and social restraints, but imagined to be within art's reach. In awakening the police to greater artistic consciousness, Lippo tempts them with an idealized, barrierless profession partaking of holiness. He gains interpretive advantage by exploiting their naïveté, their torpor, and even their vain aspirations.