Lines 172-211 Summary

But there my triumph's straw-fire flared and funked;
Their betters took their turn to see and say:
The Prior and the learned pulled a face
And stopped all that in no time. "How? what's here?
Quite from the mark of painting, bless us all!
Faces, arms, legs, and bodies like the true
As much as pea and pea! it's devil's-game!
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—
Man's soul, and it's a fire, smoke . . . no, it's not . . .
It's vapour done up like a new-born babe—
(In that shape when you die it leaves your mouth)
It's . . . well, what matters talking, it's the soul!
Give us no more of body than shows soul!
Here's Giotto, with his Saint a-praising God,
That sets us praising—why not stop with him?
Why put all thoughts of praise out of our head
With wonder at lines, colours, and what not?
Paint the soul, never mind the legs and arms!
Rub all out, try at it a second time.
Oh, that white smallish female with the breasts,
She's just my niece . . . Herodias, I would say,—
Who went and danced and got men's heads cut off!
Have it all out!" Now, is this sense, I ask?
A fine way to paint soul, by painting body
So ill, the eye can't stop there, must go further
And can't fare worse! Thus, yellow does for white
When what you put for yellow's simply black,
And any sort of meaning looks intense
When all beside itself means and looks nought.
Why can't a painter lift each foot in turn,
Left foot and right foot, go a double step,
Make his flesh liker and his soul more like,
Both in their order? Take the prettiest face,
The Prior's niece . . . patron-saint—is it so pretty
You can't discover if it means hope, fear,
Sorrow or joy? won't beauty go with these?

• After attracting so much attention of the good variety from the regular old monks, Lippo now attracts the wrong kind of attention from the Prior and the more bookish types. It turns out that they're not happy at all with what he's been doing.
• The Prior (and here we get more dramatic monologue within a dramatic monologue) describes Lippo's superb real-life paintings as "devil's-game" (178). Yikes—that's not a phrase you really want heard in a monastery referring to your work.
• These hoity-toity learned monks don't appreciate such realism that's like "pea and pea" (178). Instead, they would much prefer that Lippo's paintings make people forget they even have flesh.
• The flesh is just the corrupted surface that is the temporary container for what's really important—the immortal soul. It's like that fruit and veggie peel thing again, only kicked up several notches.
• Even though he wants Lippo to paint things that will lift men above the "perishable clay" (180), the Prior struggles with describing what the soul really is in lines 184-187. He can't even express himself clearly here, and tries several metaphors that fail. Plus, check out the ellipses and the hyphens, which suggest a difficulty in articulating this concept. In the end, he drops an exclamation point on us and basically says, "I can't tell you what it is. That's just what it is. And that's the end of it!" (187).
• He really wants Lippo to paint no more of the body than is absolutely necessary for elevating the immortal soul. He cites Giotto, a late thirteenth-early-fourteenth-century Florentine painter, as a good example.
• All those colors and lines and artistry that Lippo is daubing on his wall distracts the viewer from praising the divine soul, and this seems to really chap the Prior's hide.
• Lippo has apparently painted the Prior's niece ("that white smallish female with the breasts") to look like King Herod's sister-in-law, and mother of Salome, who got John the Baptist's head cut off. Hmm... are you getting the idea that maybe the Prior's "niece" isn't really his niece at all? Why would the Prior be noticing her breasts up in line 195?
• In any case, the Prior demands that Lippo get rid of everything and start over, which really insults him. In a bitter tone, the artistic monk demands to know what sense there is in painting the body in a purposefully dumbed-down way. How would that get to the soul? Why can't he do both—paint the physical body in a realistic way that would then artistically showcase the soul?
• Fra Lippo really seems to dwell quite a bit on the Prior's niece here. He apparently thinks she's a super-hottie, and uses her face as an example of how it's an idiotic proposition (in his humble opinion) to accept that the beauty of her face will mask the emotions behind it.