Fra Lippo Lippi

Fra Lippo Lippi, poem by Robert Browning, published in the two-volume collection Men and Women in 1855. Considered one of Browning’s finest dramatic monologues, “Fra Lippo Lippi” is written in blank verse that allows Browning free expression of colloquial vigour. The poem is loosely based on the life of Florentine painter Filippo Lippi (c. 1406–69) as described in Giorgio Vasari’s 16th-century Lives of the Painters. The poem relates that Lippi’s impoverished aunt had placed him...