On November 17, 1855, Robert Browning’s Men and Women was published in two volumes by Chapman and Hall, a London publishing house. Although Men and Women garnered little critical or popular attention, it represents a significant development in Browning’s dramatic monologue form. This collection brings together the expressions of 50 “men and women,” including that of Fra Lippo Lippi, a fifteenth-century Italian painter. Many of the themes of artistic depiction explored in “Fra Lippo Lippi” would be revisited by Browning the poet in a later poetic hit, The Ring and the Book (1868).

To read a related blog post, click here: https://blogs.baylor.edu/19crs/2020/01/15/blots-and-blanks-discussions-of-artistic-depiction-in-the-ring-and-the-book-and-fra-lippo-lippi/