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The Context of Browning's Painter Poems: Aesthetics, Polemics, Histories

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

David J. Delaura
David J. Delaura*
Affiliation:
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia
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Abstract

The neo-Catholic apologist Alexis Rio argued in 1836 that the idealism of medieval art was destroyed in the fifteenth century by a growing “paganism” and “naturalism.” Browning’s refutation in “Pictor Ignotus” of Rio’s defense of the Italian Pre-Raphaelites involved a severe distortion of the historical record. Rio’s thesis was widely debated in the late forties; above all, Charles Kingsley, whose definition of a “Protestant” realism was a direct response to the new ascetic theory, was a source of Browning’s more complex views of the fifties. “Fra Lippo Lippi” answers Rio, though its sensualism is only one component of Browning’s unstable doctrine. Browning’s polemical designs, which led him to play fast and loose with historical fact, explain both the iconoclasm and the conformity of the poem. Elsewhere, Browning’s endorsement of realism was limited by fear of an art that proclaims beauty to be its own self-sufficing end.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 95 , Issue 3 , May 1980 , pp. 367 - 388
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1980

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References

Notes

1 Rio, De la poésie chrétienne (Paris: Debécourt, 1836). A second and fuller edition, De l'art chrétien, appeared in 1855. I rely here primarily on the English version of the first edition, translated by “Miss Wells”: The Poetry of Christian Art (London: Bosworth, 1854), referred to throughout by page number alone.

2 Wallace K. Ferguson, The Renaissance in Historical Thought: Five Centuries of Interpretation (Boston: Houghton, 1948), p. 126.

3 The Genius of Christianity, trans. Charles D. White (Baltimore: Murphy, 1856), p. 377.

4 A point well made by W. D. Robson-Scott in The Literary Background of the Gothic Revival in Germany (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), pp. 114–19.

5 “Paintings in Paris and the Netherlands” is cited here from The Aesthetic and Miscellaneous Works of Friedrich von Schlegel, trans. E. J. Millington (1849; rpt. London: Bell, 1900), p. 49. This edition, in Bohn's Standard Library, is hereafter cited in the text by page number alone. The English translation of Schlegel received very little attention when it first appeared, and Wackenroder's Outpourings (not translated in the nineteenth century) seems to have been virtually unknown in England during the period. See German Literature in British Magazines, 1750–1860, ed. B. Q. Morgan and A. R. Hohlfeld (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1949). For the influence of Wackenroder and Schlegel on the Nazarenes, see Keith Andrews. The Nazarenes (Oxford: Clarendon, 1964), pp. 13–18.

6 Mary Camille Bowe, François Rio (Paris: Boivin [1938]), pp. 54, 80. Rio's Munich experience is best treated in his Epilogue à l'art chrétien (Paris: Hachette, 1872), Ch. v. The “art as revelation” quotation is from René Wellek's A History of Modern Criticism, 17501950, ii (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1955), 75.

7 Wiseman, “The Philosophy of Art,” Dub/in Review, 1 (1836), 435–60. Apparently he was assisted by John Steinmetz, “Belgian Correspondent of Wiseman”; see Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, II, 1087.

8 Clark, The Gothic Revival (London: Constable, 1928), p. 143.

9 See T. Wemyss Reid, The Life, Letters, and Friendships of Richard Monckton Milnes, First Lord Houghton, 2 vols., 2nd ed. (London: Cassell, 1890), numerous references under “Rio.” Robert Browning met Milnes about 1837, and there is evidence that they were well acquainted by 1846.

10 Bowe, pp. 121, 123, 126, 137, 142, 150. Rio's journals indicate an amazing range of acquaintances; see L. Gougaud, “La Société lettrée de Londres … en 1839,” Revue d'Histoire Ecclésiastique, 30 (1934), 297–333, 559–86. The Gladstone quotation is taken from Wilfrid Ward, The Life and Times of Cardinal Wiseman (London: Longmans, Green, 1897), I, 96. Landor's comment appears in a letter of 14 Oct. 1841, in Letters of Walter Savage Landor, ed. Stephen Wheeler (London: Duckworth, 1899), p. 87. Landor, Wordsworth, Milnes, and Caroline Norton, among others, contributed verses to Rio's La Petite Chouannerie (1842). Carlyle's assessment appears in The Correspondence of Emerson and Carlyle, ed. Joseph Slater (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1964), p. 302. Jane Carlyle commented on 7 April 1839: “I had fancied [Rio] a stern, bigoted enthusiast, whereas he is a sort of French John Sterling; if possible even more voluble and transparent; and his Catholicism sits on him just about as lightly as John's Church-of-Englandism sits on him.” New Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle, ed. Alexander Carlyle (London: John Lane, 1903), I, 73–74.

11 One of the few to see, even if in passing, how “enormously influential” Rio was is Francis Haskell, Rediscoveries in Art (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1976), pp. 112, 65, n.

12 Mozley, The British Critic, 25 (1839), 479–98. Some clergymen, like Newman and Wiseman, resisted the Gothic craze (and presumably some of the polemical view of art implicit in it) : on Newman, see James F. White, The Cambridge Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1962), pp. 23–24; on Wiseman, see Charles L. Eastlake, A History of the Gothic Revival (1872; rpt. n.p.: American Life Foundation, 1975), p. 347. On Rio, see Ecclesiologist, 3 (1844), 181–84, and 5 (1846), 145–46; on the Nazarenes, see 3 (1844), 83. D. J. Dalgairns' favorable review of La Petite Chouannerie in the British Critic, 32 (1842), 261–99, includes a long and approving summary of Rio's art arguments (p. 264).

13 Palgrave, “The Fine Arts in Florence,” Quarterly Review, 66 (1840), 350–51, n. Palgrave also cites Henry Drummond's Letter to Thomas Phillips … on the Connection between the Fine Arts and Religion (London: Fraser, 1840). Drummond, one of the founders of the Irvingite sect, acknowledges that his account of the history of Christian art derives “principally” from “the recent work of Monsieur Rio” (p. 3).

14 Hayward, Quarterly Review, 70 (1842), 78–80, 97.

15 Contrasts, introd. H. R. Hitchcock, 2nd ed. (1841; rpt. Leicester: Leicester Univ. Press, 1969), p. iii.

16 And p. 19: Rio's “admirable” work “must produce many converts to ancient art.”

17 Stanton, Pugin (New York: Viking, 1972), pp. 8586. Montalembert's Du vandalisme (Paris: Debécourt, 1839) is cited at length in Contrasts, pp. 76–95. Pugin's paragraph on Savonarola (p. v) simply summarizes Rio's elaborate treatment (1836 ed., pp. 304–63, esp. the early pages). Du vandalisme offered a lengthy and glowing summary of Rio's book (pp. 72–134) but referred to Rio's treatment of Savonarola only in highly general terms (pp. 114–16). (Montalembert's polemical view of Christian art and architecture was itself derived from Rio's influence in 1831–32; see Mrs. [Margaret] Oliphant, Memoir of Count de Montalembert [London: William Blackwood, 1872], I, 208.)

18 A. W. Pugin, An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture (London: John Weale, 1843), p. 7.

19 Shelley, Rambles, 2 vols. (London: Moxon, 1844). She had previously come to know the “accomplished” Rio in London “at [Samuel] Rogers” and had then encountered him in Dresden (Aug. 1842) and spent whole days with him and his wife in Rome (April 1843) (The Letters of Mary W. Shelley, ed. Frederick L. Jones [Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1944], n, 163 and n., 182). Jean de Palacio sees Rio as a central figure in Mary's artistic and spiritual development (Mary Shelley, dans son œuvre [Paris: Klincksieck, 1969], pp. 549–66). Browning's familiarity with Rambles is only the most explicit piece of the abundant evidence showing his detailed knowledge of Rio's thesis; but I also suggest at several points that Browning's treatment of Renaissance figures points clearly to some more direct knowledge of Rio's work.

20 Letter of 11 Sept. 1845, in The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1845–46, ed. Elvan Kintner (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1969), I, 190. There is an unexplained reference in 1859 to a “Mdme Rio,” in Dearest Isa: Robert Browning's Letters to Isabella Blagden, ed. Edward C. McAleer (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1951), p. 34.

21 William Clyde DeVane, A Browning Handbook, 2nd ed. (New York: Appleton, 1955), p. 156.

22 See Lionello Venturi, History of Art Criticism, trans. Charles Marriott (New York: Dutton, 1936), pp. 106–07.

23 The English battle of the styles, in both painting and architecture, reenacted in a new shape the deep split that developed in German culture before 1820, between Goethe and his partisans on the one hand and the party of Friedrich Schlegel and the Nazarenes on the other. The symbolic key moment is the attack in 1817 by J. H. Meyer (recording Goethe's views) on the “Neu-deutsche religios-patriotische Kunst” sponsored by Wackenroder and Schlegel. See Robson-Scott (see n. 4, above), p. 113, and Camillo von Klenze, “The Growth of Interest in the Early Italian Masters,” Modern Philology, 4 (1906), 234–35, 247. Heine furiously resumed the attack on the “lunacy” over medieval art in Die romantische Sckule in the mid-1830s. Theories of the decline of the arts since the Renaissance were easily converted into views on the rise and fall of “modern” civilization as a whole—in direct opposition, in England, to the prevailing Whig interpretation. A parallel if somewhat independent English view of the “death of poetry,” from the 1820s on, has governed the defense of poetry in English-speaking countries ever since. See David J. DeLaura, “The Future of Poetry,” in Carlyle and His Contemporaries, ed. John Clubbe (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1976), pp. 148–80.

24 See Ferguson on this “idealization of the Renaissance man, combining the cult of genius with that of free, egoistic personality” (p. 128).

25 Modern Painters, Vol. rv (1856), Vol. vi of The Works of John Ruskin, ed. ?. T. Cook and A. Wedderburn (London: George Allen, 1903–12), pp. 446–49.

26 New Letters of Robert Browning, ed. W. C. DeVane and K. L. Knickerbocker (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1950), pp. 35–36. The allusions are best explained in Robert A. Greenberg, “Ruskin, Pugin, and the Contemporary Context of ‘The Bishop Orders His Tomb,‘ ” PMLA, 84 (1969), 1588–94.

27 Melchiori, “Browning in Italy,” in Robert Browning, ed. Isobel Armstrong, Writers and Their Background (Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 1975), p. 174. Though I agree with Greenberg that the poem's “exposure of the Renaissance spirit answers to the reader's condition” (p. 1593), it seems to me untrue to suggest that Browning shared Pugin's extreme hostility to the modern world, at least in any consistent way (p. 1592). Browning by and large refused to accept the new pessimistic reading of post-Renaissance (and sometimes post Enlightenment) history currently available in such diverse figures as Pugin, Rio, Carlyle, and the leaders of the Oxford Movement and (soon thereafter) in Ruskin, Arnold, and most of the Pre-Raphaelites.

28 The powerful if overstated view that “Browning has no separate life of his own because he lives his life in poetry” occurs in J. Hillis Miller, The Disappearance of God (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1963), p. 102.

29 A modern with no theological ax to grind can take the facts of the case for granted; see, e.g., André Malraux, Saturn: An Essay on Goya (London: Phaidon, 1957), p. 147.

30 Bullen, “Browning's ‘Pictor Ignotus’ …,” Review of English Studies, NS 23 (1972), 313–19. The identification was made very early: “Early Christian Art,” The Rambler, 3 (1848), 120.

31 Michael H. Bright, English Language Notes, 13 (1976), 192–94, 209–15.

32 Rio, pp. 279–80; cited in Bullen, English Language Notes, 13 (1976), 206. Bright, in his two replies, neglects Bullen's important evidence from Rio of a third option: that is, that there was a division in spirit and in range of artistic representation well into the sixteenth century. Bullen's retort that Bartolommeo did at one point seek “anonymity” (p. 206) also carries some weight.

33 Apart from The Ring and the Book, which I quote from the Cambridge edition (Boston: Houghton, 1895), Browning's poems are cited from Poetical Works, 1833–1864, ed. Ian Jack (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970).

34 Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, trans. Mrs. Jonathan Foster (London: Bohn, 1851), ii, 462–63.

35 Jameson, Memoirs of the Early Italian Painters, 10th ed. (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1859), pp. 164, 166; hereafter cited in the text by page number.

36 As Walter Houghton and G. Robert Stange claim, in a rare burst of incautiousness (Victorian Poetry and Poetics, 2nd ed. [Boston: Houghton, 1968], p. 200, n.). It may be more accurate to say that, in the absence of the kind of external evidence recently adduced, including my own here, Browning's creative failure is in arousing only a general disapproval and leaving the reader too few clues to judge coherently the various elements of the painter's self-defense. Of course the issue of artistic and intellectual integrity is extremely complex, and I use ethical and moral categories only in a broad sense. Moreover, any ethical issue in “Pictor Ignotus” is far more muted than in “Lippo Lippi,” where a contrary distortion is practiced with regard to a historical figure actually named. Ian Jack is quoted from his Browning's Major Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon, 1973), p. 213.

37 Francis G. Townsend, Ruskin and the Landscape Feeling, Illinois Studies in Language and Literature, 35, No. 3 (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1951), p. 27. The evidence I present in this article gives a new focus to the Ruskin-Rio relationship by showing how extensively Rio's ideas were debated long before Ruskin's most public engagement in the 1850s. Indeed, the effect of the earlier debates on changes in Ruskin's own views and on his rhetoric deserves study.

38 E. T. Cook, The Life of John Ruskin (London: George Allen, 1911), i, 168. The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ed. Frederick G. Kenyon (New York: Macmillan, 1897), i, 384; cited hereafter as LEBB.

39 Ruskin, Works, ix, 45, 47. The briefest reference to “the foul torrent of the Renaissance” occurs in The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), viii, 98. Ruskin's great shift of opinion culminates in “a full attack” on Rio and Lindsay in Modern Painters, Vol. v (1860); see Richard J. Dellamora's excellent “The Revaluation of ‘Christian’ Art: Ruskin's Appreciation of Fra Angelico, 1845–60,” Univ. of Toronto Quarterly, 43 (1974), 143–50.

40 Browning and Ruskin's shared themes are interestingly explored in Curtis Dahl's “Browning, Architecture, and lohn Ruskin,” Studies in Browning and His Circle, 6, No. 1 (1978), 32–45. Ruskin's comment on Browning is quoted from a letter of late Jan. 1856, referring to forthcoming praise—in Modern Painters, Vol. iv—of “The Bishop Orders His Tomb”; see David J. DeLaura, “Ruskin and the Brownings: Twenty-Five Unpublished Letters,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 54 (1972), 329.

41 See Anna Jameson: Letters and Friendships (1812—1860), ed. Janet Erskine (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1915), pp. 203–04.

42 For a typically tangled expostulation on the subject, see Jameson's letter to Lady Byron of Feb. 1847, in Clara Thomas, Love and Work Enough: The Life of Anna Jameson (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1967), p. 177.

43 One of Jameson's sources is the Italienische Forschungen (3 vols., 1827–31) of Karl Friedrich von Rumohr, never translated into English. Virtually the first master of the new objective and documentary style, Rumohr became for Rio “mon veritable initiateur” (Epilogue, II 121; see also I, 336)—that is, for the facts of art history. Expanding on Schlegel's views, Rumohr learnedly developed the split between the “strength and virility” of Masaccio and the “peculiar depth” of Fra Angelico. But though Rumohr, a Catholic convert, was attracted to the simplicity of the religious painters, he was enough of a rationalist to refuse to measure art by the new devotional standard or to condemn the later Raphael. I depend on the excellent treatment by Klenze, pp. 248–54; see also Robson-Scott, pp. 240–42.

44 Jameson, Sacred and Legendary Art, 5th ed. (London: Longmans, Green, 1866), pp. 7–8. Jameson speaks of “my friend M. Rio (to whose charming and eloquent exposition of Christian Art I refer with ever-new delight)” (p. 17). The Brownings of course knew the volume; see LEBB, I, 82.

45 Rather surprisingly, Jameson presents at length, and without the usual equivocation, nearly the full Rio thesis in the introduction to her Legends of the Madonna (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1852), pp. xxxii-xxxv: she deplores the “paganised and degenerate” new influences, praises the effects of Savonarola's preaching, and finds the “grand materialism” of Michelangelo “profane and offensive” and the sixteenth-century madonnas “disgusting.” She cites a long “poetical” passage from Rio (p. 346, n.) and Browning's Colombe II.263–68 (p. xlvi). Browning received the volume by Aug. 1851 (LEBB, ii, 16).

46 Lindsay, Sketches in the History of Christian Art, 3 vols. (London: John Murray, 1847), i, xii.

47 Lindsay refers to “the eloquent and elegant” Rio directly on occasion (ii, 253, 284, 287, n.; iii, 175, n., 178, n., 188–89, n.). He also speaks with careful ambiguity of an “admirable observation” by Rio, in “a work graceful, eloquent and appreciative, and calculated to make enthusiasts in the cause of the ‘Ecole Mystique,‘ exclusively of all other excellence” (ii, 232, n.).

48 M. Hobart Seymour, A Pilgrimage to Rome (London: Seeley's, 1848), pp. 135–44.

49 The Brownings met Kingsley during their visit to England in 1852. Elizabeth, who speaks of him familiarly as “the author of ‘Alton Locke,’ ‘Yeast,’ &c,” found him “delightful” (LEBB, ii, 83, 86).

50 Because of the great number of reprints, I refer to chapters in the 1851 book version. All the cited passages appeared first in 1848.

51 Fraser's Magazine, March 1849; cited here from Kingsley's Literary and General Lectures and Essays (London: Macmillan, 1880), pp. 187–226.

52 Kingsley may well have taken his cue from James Anthony Froude's The Nemesis of Faith (London: John Chapman, 1849), published the month before. (Already well acquainted with Froude, Kingsley was to become his brother-in-law in October.) If the AngloCatholics were to “unprotestantize” the Church of England, the nation would cease to produce great men and would “substitute devotion, endurance, humility, selfdenial, sanctity, and faith” for “poetry [i.e., romance, the poetry of action], courage, daring, enterprise, resolution, and broad honest understanding” (p. 151).

53 Alton Locke (London: Macmillan, 1873), p. 74. 54 Cited in Ruskin's Works, xxxvi, xxxiv.

55 Ormond, “Browning and Painting,” in Robert Browning, ed. Armstrong, pp. 188–89. See also LEBB, I, 448, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Letters to Mrs. David Ogilvy, 1849–61, ed. Peter N. Heydon and Philip Kelley (New York: Quadrangle/Browning Institute, 1973), pp. 5, 8.

56 The version given by William S. Peterson, “The Proofs of Browning's Men and Women” Studies in Browning and His Circle, 2, No. 2 (1975), 25.

57 Lawrence Poston comments on the “ironic” juxtaposition of “Lippo Lippi” and “Pictor Ignotus” in 1863 (“Browning Arranges Browning,” Studies in Browning and His Circle,“ 2, No. 1 [1974], 39–54).

58 Rumohr spoke of Lippo's easel pictures as “schwach, bisweilen derb und gemein” (Klenze, p. 251). Franz Kugler spoke of Lippo's pictures as coarse and vulgar but “full of character” and showing “a humorous conception of life” (Handbook of the History of Painting, trans. Margaret Hutton [London: John Murray, 1842], pp. 110–11). In the first edition of Murray's Hand-Book for Travellers in Northern Italy ([London, 1842], p. 430), which the Brownings knew (LEBB, i, 330–32), Palgrave may have provided Jameson with her point of view: “a profligate and dissolute monk”; “great spirit and animation in faces”; “wild energy.” His views of art history, much influenced by Rio (see n. 13 above), were forcibly softened by Murray in later editions.

59 Johnstone Parr notes that Jameson runs against the tradition by making Lippo, and not Masaccio, the “first” of the new naturalists (“Browning's ‘Fra Lippo Lippi,‘ Vasari's Masaccio, and Mrs. Jameson,” English Language Notes, 5 [1968], 277–83). In Rumohr's version of the received view (Klenze, pp. 250–51), Masaccio and Angelico represented the “two currents of the new art.” Then, in Kugler's formulation (p. 110), Masaccio's “dignified seriousness” gave way to Lippo's sensuality and vulgarity. But Parr sees none of this complexity, and certainly not Rio's role. Jameson's reading of the “great schism” obviously derives from Rio (pp. 113–14): by a “fatal” development in the fifteenth century, painters were “divided by a kind of schism,” etc.

60 What the generality of mid-century readers and reviewers were not prepared for was the new attempt, usually associated with Thackeray, “to paint life as it is, coloured as little as may be by the hues of imagination”—that is, an art, predictive of later naturalism, that seemed to preclude both artistic shaping and the interjection of “idealizing” human value. See Richard Stang, The Theory of the Novel, 1850–1870 (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1959), pp. 147–50.

61 See James C. Simmons, The Novelist as Historian (The Hague: Mouton, 1973), esp. pp. 17, 20, 23, 61. For the larger movement toward an “objective” historiography, see J. H. Plumb, The Death of the Past (Boston: Houghton, 1970).

62 Boyd Litzinger argues that the “sauciness” of Browning's friar is more traceable to Landor's fiction (“Filippo Lippi and Eugenius iv”) than to Vasari's “comparatively sedate account” (“The Prior's Niece in ‘Fra Lippo Lippi,‘ ” Notes and Queries, NS 8 [1961], 344–45), but Landor of course cannot be accounted a “historical” justification for the change.

63 Waltraud Leisgang seems to be the only critic who mentions “the psychological refinement” and “almost over-sensitive melancholy” of Lippo's actual paintings, though he does not see the problematic relationship to the painting in the poem (“ ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’: A Picture Poem,” Browning Society Notes, 3, No. 3 [1973], 30).

64 See Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972), pp. 131–32, 137.

65 Cited in Kenneth Allott, ed., Selected Poems of Robert Browning (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967), p. 206.

66 See Boyd Litzinger, “Incident as Microcosm: The Prior's Niece in ‘Fra Lippo Lippi,‘ ” College English, 22 (1961), 409–10.

67 Susan Hackett and John Ferns survey those critics, the majority, who detect varying degrees of ambivalence toward Lippo (“A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Monk: The Degree of Irony in Browning's ‘Fra Lippo Lippi,‘ ” Studies in Browning and His Circle, 4, No. 2 [1976], 105–18). Almost no one seems to have fitted the complexities of the character to the ambiguities of the doctrine. W. O. Raymond explains how Browning himself becomes entangled in the casuistry of his “low and base” special pleaders (“Browning's Casuists,” in his The Infinite Moment, 2nd ed. [Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1950], pp. 129–55). But although the disjunction between Lippo and his doctrine is not so wide as it is in Sludge or Don Juan, none of the other casuists, with the possible exception of Blougram at points, presents such important doctrine that goes so relatively uncriticized.

68 A point well explained in Ralph W. Rader, “The Dramatic Monologue and Related Lyric Forms,” Critical Inquiry, 3 (1976), 131–51.

69 Paul A. Makurath usefully defines the “flesh” in the poem as “the body or especially the face seen clearly and completely in life or depicted fully and realistically in art” (“Fra Lippo's Theory of Art,” Studies in Browning and His Circle, 4, No. 2 [1976], 95–104).

70 Makurath perceptively suggests that Lippo's “artistic genius” and his “sensuality” are both rooted in “the same experience of want” (pp. 103–04). Browning may imply that artistic vitality is tied to Lippo's “participation in various human activities,” including the sexual, but “Lippo does not seem to be aware of such a relation.”

71 Letter from Rossetti to Ruskin, Nov. 1855, Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ed. Oswald Doughty and John Robert Wahl (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), I, 277. Letter of George Eliot, Jan. 1856, quoted in Browning: The Critical Heritage, ed. Boyd Litzinger and Donald Smalley (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), p. 177. Simpson, Rambler, NS 5 (1856), 71.

72 And 1. 176: “Thou hast done now with eyes for the actual; begin with the seer's!” It is also of a piece with the “transcendental,” or “idealist,” ending of Kingsley's argument in 1849 (Essays, p. 219) : he thanks the “early ascetic painters” for teaching “the superiority of the spirit over the flesh.”

73 The reference to Vasari's Andrea appears in Dougald B. MacEachen, “Browning's Use of His Sources in Andrea del Sarto,' ” Victorian Poetry, 8 (1970), 61–64. An exception to the general failure to note a correspondence between Andrea and Lippo is the important article by Richard Benvenuto, “Lippo and Andrea: The Pro and Contra of Browning's Realism,” Studies in English Literature, 13 (1973), 643–52; unfortunately, however, it lacks any context in contemporary debate.