The Browning Cyclopædia: A Guide to the Study of the Works of Robert Browning. Edward Berdoe
Virgin. It was for the cloisters of the church of the Servi at Florence that Andrea del Sarto painted the Riposo. His Nativity of the B.V. Mary is a grand fresco, the characters are noble and dignified, and “draped in the magnificent taste which distinguished Andrea.” The following account of the artist’s life is summarised from the article on Del Sarto by Mr. W. M. Rossetti in the Encyc. Brit. He was an easy-going plebeian, to whom a modest position in life and scanty gains were no grievances. As an artist he must have known his own value; but he probably rested content in the sense of his superlative powers as an executant, and did not aspire to the rank of a great inventor or leader, for which, indeed, he had no vocation. He led a social sort of life among his compeers of the art. He fell in love with Lucrezia del Fede, wife of a hatter named Carlo Recanati; the latter dying opportunely, the tailor’s son married her on December 26th, 1512. She was a very handsome woman, and has come down to us treated with great suavity in many a picture of her lover-husband, who constantly painted her as a Madonna or otherwise; and even in painting other women he made them resemble Lucrezia in general type. Vasari, who was at one time a pupil of Andrea, describes her as faithless, jealous, overbearing, and vixenish with the apprentices. She lived to a great age, surviving her second husband forty years. Before the end of 1516, a Pietà of his composition, and afterwards a Madonna, were sent to the French Court. These were received with applause; and the art-loving monarch Francis I. suggested in 1518 that Andrea should come to Paris. He left his wife in Florence and went accordingly, and was very cordially received, and moreover for the first time in his life handsomely remunerated. His wife urged him to return to Italy. The king assented, on the understanding that his absence was to be short; and he entrusted Andrea with a sum of money to be expended in purchasing works of art for the king. Andrea could not resist temptation, and spent the king’s money and some of his own in building a house for himself in Florence. He fell into disgrace with the king, but no serious punishment followed. In 1520 he resumed work in Florence, and painted many pictures for the cloisters of Lo Scalzo. He dwelt in Florence throughout the memorable siege, which was followed by an infectious pestilence. He caught the malady, struggled against it with little or no tending from his wife, who held aloof, and died, no one knowing much about it at the moment, on January 22nd, 1531, at the early age of forty-three. He was buried unceremoniously in the church of the Servi. Mr. Rossetti gives the following criticisms on his work as an artist. “Andrea had true pictorial style, a very high standard of correctness, and an enviable balance of executive endowments. The point of technique in which he excelled least was perhaps that of discriminating the varying textures of different objects and surfaces. There is not much elevation or ideality in his works – much more of reality.” He lacked invention notwithstanding his great technical skill. He had no inward impulse toward the high and noble; he was a man without fervour, and had no enthusiasm for the true and good. It is said that Michelangelo once remarked that if he had attempted greater things he might have rivalled Rafael, but Andrea was not a man for the mountain-top – the plains sufficed for him.
[The Poem.] On the bare historical facts, as recorded by Vasari in his life of Andrea del Sarto, Mr. Browning has framed this wonderful art-poem. He has taken Vasari’s “notes” and framed “not another sound but a star,” as he says in his Abt Vogler. Given the Vasari life, he has mixed it with his thought, and has transfigured it so that the sad, infinitely pathetic soul, in its stunted growth and wasted form, lives before us in Mr. Browning’s lines. As Abt Vogler is his greatest music-poem, so this is his greatest art-poem, and both are unique. No poet has ever given us such utterances on music and painting as we possess in these works: if all the poet’s work were to perish save these, they would suffice to insure immortality for their author. It is said that the poem was suggested by a picture in the Pitti Palace at Florence. “Faultless but soulless” is the verdict of art critics on Andrea’s works. Why is this? Mr. Browning’s poem tells us in no hesitating phrase that the secret lay in the fact that Andrea was an immoral man, an infatuated man, passionately demanding love from a woman who had neither heart nor intellect, a wife for whom he sacrificed his soul and the highest interests of his art. He knew and loved Lucrezia while she was another man’s wife; he was content that she should also love other men when she was his. He robbed King Francis, his generous patron, that he might give the money to his unworthy spouse. He neglected his parents in their poverty and old age. Is there not in these facts the secret of his failure? To Mr. Browning there is, and his poem tells us why. But, it will be objected, many great geniuses have been immoral men. This is so, but we cannot argue the point here; the poet’s purpose is to show how in this particular case the evil seed bore fruit after its kind. The poem opens with the artist’s attempts to bribe his wife by money to accord him a little semblance of love: he promises to paint that he may win gold for her. The keynote of the poem is struck in these opening words. It is evening, and Andrea is weary with his work, but never weary of praising Lucrezia’s beauty; sadly he owns that he is at best only a shareholder in his wife’s affections, that even her pride in him is gone, that she neither understands nor cares to understand his art. He tells her that he can do easily and perfectly what at the bottom of his heart he wishes for, deep as that might be; he could do what others agonise to do all their lives and fail in doing, yet he knows for all that there burns a truer light of God in them than in him. Their works drop groundward, though their souls have glimpses of heaven that are denied to him. He could have beaten Rafael had he possessed Rafael’s soul; for the Urbinate’s technical skill, as he half hesitatingly shows, is inferior to his own; and had his Lucrezia urged him, inspired him, to claim a seat by the side of Michelangelo and Rafael, he might for her sake have done it. He sees he is but a half-man working in an atmosphere of silver-grey. He had his chance at Fontainebleau; there he sometimes seemed to leave the ground, but he had a chain which dragged him down. Lucrezia called him. Not only for her did he forsake the higher art ambitions, but the common ground of honesty; he descended to cement his walls with the gold of King Francis which he had stolen, and for her. From dishonesty to connivance at his wife’s infidelity is an easy step; and so, while in the act of expressing his remorse at his ingratitude to the king, we find him asking Lucrezia quite naturally, as a matter of ordinary occurrence —
“Must you go?
That cousin here again? he waits outside?
Must see you – you, and not with me?”
Here we discover the secret of the soullessness: the fellow has the tailor in his blood, even though the artist is supreme at the fingers’ ends. He is but the craftsman after all. Think of Fra Angelico painting his saints and angels on his knees, straining his eyes to catch the faintest glimpse of the heavenly radiance of Our Lady’s purity and holiness, feeling that he failed, too dazzled by the brightness of Divine light, to catch more than its shadow, and we shall know why there is soul in the great Dominican painter, and why there is none in the Sarto. Lucrezia, despicable as she was, was not the cause of her husband’s failure. His marriage, his treatment of Francis, his allowing his parents to starve, to die of want, while he paid gaming debts for his wife’s lover, – all these things tell us what the man was. No woman ruined his soul; he had no soul to ruin!
Notes. —Fiesole, a small but famous episcopal city of Italy, on the crown of a hill above the Arno, about three miles to the west of Florence. Morello, a mountain of the Apennines. The Urbinate: Rafael was born at Urbino. George Vasari, painter and author of the “Lives of the Most Excellent Italian Painters, Sculptors and Architects.” Rafael, Raphael Sanzio of Urbino. Agnolo: Michel Agnolo is the more correct form of Michael Angelo. Francis, King Francis I. of France, the royal patron of Andrea. Fontainebleau, a town of France 37 miles S.E. of Paris; its palace is one of the most sumptuous in France. “The Roman’s is the better when you pray.” Catholics, however, do not use the works of the great masters for devotional purposes nearly so much as might be supposed. No “miraculous” picture is by this class. Cue-owls: The Scops Owl: Scops Giú (Scopoli). Its cry is a ringing “ki-ou” – whence Italian “chiù” or “ciù.” “Walls in the New Jerusalem.” Revelation xxi. 15-17. Leonard, Leonardo da Vinci.
Andromeda. In Pauline, Mr. Browning has commemorated the fascination for his youthful mind which was exercised by an engraving of a picture by Caravaggio of Andromeda and Perseus. This picture was always before him as a boy, and he loved the