Text and publication
First publ. M & W, 10 Nov. 1855; repr. 1863, 1868, 1880, 1888. Our text is 1855.
The title in H proof is ‘Opus Magistri Jocti’ [A Work of Master Giotto]: see below, Composition. H proof also has corrections in B.’s hand, but only one of these (l. 261) appears in 1855 and they were clearly not intended as directions to the printer; the evidence of l. 274 suggests in fact that they were added to the proof after the publication of 1855, perhaps when B. presented the proofs to Leighton (see Appendix C, p. 888). In a letter to Dante Gabriel Rossetti of 29 Oct. 1855 B. wrote: ‘I perceive some blunders in my poems, which I shall not, I think, draw attention to, but quietly correct hereafter. But it happens unluckily that the worst of them occur just in a thing I would have you like if it might be—so, please alter the following in your copy, before you begin it, won’t you?’ (LH 42). There follow a series of corrections to vol. ii of 1855, almost all to Old Pictures. Most also appear on the list of ‘Errata’ which B. sent to his American publisher James T. Fields (B to Fields 192–4). All but one anticipate the readings of 1863; B.’s term ‘blunders’ suggests that they were misprints, but some are clearly revisions, as B. makes clear in a letter of 31 Oct. to his publisher Edward Chapman, in which he refers to ‘a few errors, and a passage or two susceptible of improvement’ (New Letters 82).
Composition and date
As soon as the Brownings arrived in Italy to begin their married life together, B. started to indulge his passion for early Italian art. His enthusiasm and expertise are attested to by a number of contemporaries, most notably Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who claimed in a letter of 25 Nov. 1855 that he ‘found Browning’s knowledge of early Italian Art beyond that of anyone I ever met—encyclopaedically beyond that of Ruskin himself ’ (William E. Fredeman ed., The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti ii [Cambridge 2002] 55:58). EBB.’s letters contain numerous stories of B.’s artistic discoveries, such as the occasion when he found the fragments of an altarpiece by Ghirlandaio in a corn-merchant’s shop just outside Florence:
The pictures [at Casa Guidi] are a few, which, Robert, who understands a good deal about Art in general & Florentine art in particular, has picked up at different times & places, for a few shillings each … [In] the early part of the winter, he bought two companion pictures of angels .. gave four & sixpence for the two .. painted on panel … He heard, where he procured them, that they had been sawn off the sides of a great picture representing the Madonna, in a church at Arezzo—the priest was reported to have said that the Madonna cd. take care of the altar alone, .. saying which, he had sawn off the angels & sold them. Well—Robert sent to Arezzo to try to get the Madonna for a few shillings more—he thought the priest cd. not resist a few more shillings. The answer was, the holy man had gone to Rome, & nothing cd. be done until his return. So we thought no more about it.—A few days since, Robert fell upon some pictures in a corn shop outside the walls, & was much struck by one called the ‘Eterno padre’ … On putting them into the light of our new drawingroom, the whole glory of the discovery became apparent … Robert cried out .. ‘How curious! the hands are painted precisely in the manner of the angels from Arezzo, in the next room—I will go and fetch them & prove it to you.’ In a moment he came back with the angels, and burst into fresh exclamations. Arabel, our angels had been sawn off that very picture … Robert is in a state of rapture at the discovery—Whenever we can afford it, we shall have the pictures fastened together, and a frame to unite them. It is a fine picture of Ghirlandaio, of whom I think there is only one specimen in the Florentine gallery. But this is not all—Robert went directly to Mr Kirkup the artist and antiquarian, who has a fine collection himself, & great experience & acumen in matters of art … After recognising and praising the Ghirlandaio, he said that Robert had done admirably in respect to the other pictures—that the crucifixion, if not Giotto, was Giottesque, of his time, and an unique specimen or nearly so, being painted upon linen .. it was very valuable, .. and that the Christ with the open gospel, a deep, solemn, moving picture, he believed to be a Cimabue, and worth five hundred guineas.
(?3 May 1850; EBB to Arabella i 314–5)
A picture similar to the ‘Eterno padre’ described can be seen above the mantel-piece in Mignaty’s picture of the drawing room at Casa Guidi.
The poem’s use of a narrator who shares this passion for collecting the works of neglected ancient masters, and the allusions to EBB.’s poem Casa Guidi Windows (see Sources and Contexts, and l. 260n.), have led some critics to suggest that the poem may have been written around 1850–51 (see e.g. David De Laura, PMLA xcv [1980] 367–88; SBC viii.2 [1980] 7–16; and Jacob Korg, Browning and Italy [Athens, OH 1983] 98–106). There are, however, a number of features which link it to early 1853. The Brownings returned to Florence in Nov. 1852 after a lengthy period in Paris: ‘dead & dull we must confess our poor poor Florence to be—trodden flat too under the heel of Austria … the people are down, down .. and loathing those who keep them down. It is certainly a very sad spectacle, and I don’t wonder that Robert should feel saddened by it—it saddens me. Such hatred, such internal revolt & protestation as we hear on all sides—the Austrians are detested’ (13–15 Nov. 1852; EBB to Arabella i 518). The political coda to the poem may be a reflection of the poet’s particularly hostile attitude towards the Austrians at this time. Moreover, in a letter of 17 Mar. 1853 to John Kenyon, at Wellesley College, B. narrates the story of the discovery of a lost ‘tablet’ (a small painting on a wooden panel) by Giotto (see ll. 233–40); Metzger, the art dealer, ‘has discovered the precious little picture by Giotto, of which Vasari says so much, and how he heard Michelagnolo admire it to heart’s content—“the death of the Virgin”—missing from S. Spirito in Vasari’s time, and supposed to be recovered in England—that is, a picture was engraved as this of Giotto’s which was by Fra Angelico—the most purely unlike of men!’ (also cited in Julia Markus, ‘ “Old Pictures in Florence” Through Casa Guidi Windows’, BIS vi [1978] 54–5.) An illustration of the tablet, now in the Gemäldegalerie of the Staatliche Museum, Berlin, is in our volume III as Plate 5. Cp. l. 4n. We therefore date the inception of the poem to Mar.–Apr. 1853, although as in other instances B. may have continued to work on the poem until shortly before publication.
Sources and contexts
(i) Artistic
B.’s knowledge of early Italian art undoubtedly derived in large part from his reading of Vasari; see headnotes to Andrea (p. 387) and Fra Lippo (p. 477). In Vasari’s life of Stefano, a follower of Giotto, whom B. mentions in the poem (see ll. 69–72n.), there is a paragraph which anticipates the poem’s argument about the importance of innovation in the arts:
[Stefano] contributed more than any other, Giotto excepted, to the amelioration of art: his powers of invention were richer and more varied, his colouring was more harmonious, and his tints were more softly blended; while, more than all, in care and diligence he surpassed all other artists. And with respect to his foreshortening, although he is defective on this point, as I have said, because of the great difficulties to be encountered, yet, more gratitude is due to him who is the first to investigate and conquer the worst obstacles in any pursuit, than to those who do but follow on the path previously made clear, even though it be with a better and more carefully regulated march. Thus, we have certainly great obligations to Stefano, for he who, walking in darkness, encourages others by showing them the way, confers the benefit of making known the dangerous points, and warning from the false road, enables those who come after to arrive in time at the desired goal.
(Foster i 137–8)
Old Pictures also makes extensive use of the opposition between Greek or Pagan and Christian art which became a commonplace of nineteenth-century art criticism; one of the most influential versions of this idea was put forward in A. W. von Schlegel’s Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature:
Among the Greeks human nature was in itself all-sufficient; it was conscious of no defects, and aspired to no higher perfection than that which it could actually attain by the exercise of its own energies. We, however, are taught by superior wisdom that man, through a grievous transgression, forfeited the place for which he was originally destined; and that the sole destination of his earthly existence is to struggle to regain his lost position, which, if left to his own strength, he can never accomplish. The old religion of the senses sought no higher possession than outward and perishable blessings; and immortality, so far as it was believed, stood shadow-like in the obscure distance, a faint dream of this sunny waking life. The very reverse of all this is the case with the Christian view: every thing finite and mortal is lost in the contemplation of infinity; life has become shadow and darkness, and the first day of our real existence dawns in the world beyond the grave … The Grecian ideal of human nature was perfect unison and proportion between all the powers,—a natural harmony. The moderns, on the contrary, have arrived at the consciousness of an internal discord which renders such an ideal impossible; and hence the endeavour of their poetry is to reconcile these two worlds between which we find ourselves divided, and to blend them indissolubly together. The impressions of the senses are to be hallowed, as it were, by a mysterious connexion with higher feelings; and the soul, on the other hand, embodies its forebodings, or indescribable intuitions of infinity, in types and symbols borrowed from the visible world … In Grecian art and poetry we find an original and unconscious unity of form and matter; in the modern, so far as it has remained true to its own spirit, we observe a keen struggle to unite the two, as being naturally in opposition to each other. The Grecian executed what it proposed in the utmost perfection; but the modern can only do justice to its endeavours after what is infinite by approximation; and, from a greater appearance of imperfection, is in greater danger of not being duly appreciated.
(A. W. von Schlegel, A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, tr. John Black [1846], 26–7)
For B.’s knowledge of Schlegel see letter of 30 Jan. 1880 to the Revd J. D. Williams; BIS iv (1976) 14. Schlegel’s arguments helped rehabilitate the imperfections or defects of early Christian art, and so facilitated the rediscovery of medieval and early Renaissance art celebrated in the poem.
Similar sentiments can be found in the work of A. W. N. Pugin (see Bishop Blougram 4–6n., p. 285) and A. F. Rio, whose De la poésie chrétienne B. notes as an influence on Mrs Jameson in a letter to EBB. of 11 Sept. 1845 (Correspondence xi 70). Rio was in fact a personal acquaintance of Anna Jameson, having spent the years 1836–41 in London. She, in turn, was a close friend of EBB., and accompanied the Brownings on their wedding journey to Italy (see headnote to A Pretty Woman, III 20). Mrs Jameson’s writings on Italian art history make extensive use of the distinction between Christian and Pagan art, and De Laura (in his SBC article; see above) notes the congruity between her views and those expressed by the speaker in the poem: ‘If … we are to consider painting as purely religious, we must go back to the infancy of modern art, when the expression of sentiment was all in all, and the expression of life in action nothing;—when, reversing the aim of Greek art, the limbs and form were defective, while character, as it is shown in physiognomy, was delicately felt, and truly rendered’ (Mrs Jameson, Memoirs and Essays Illustrative of Art, Literature and Social Morals [1846] 6). B. would certainly have known Ruskin’s argument, in vol. ii of The Stones of Venice (publ. July 1853), that Greek architecture was essentially enslaving, where medieval Christian art was democratic. In fact, the poem may be read in the context of some of the ideas and attitudes that Ruskin was engaged in popularizing in the early 1850s in Modern Painters and later in The Stones of Venice. All the artists mentioned in Old Pictures are referred to repeatedly by Ruskin, in terms of high commendation, at the expense of later artists, including Raphael: the label ‘Pre-Raphaelite’ adopted by the group of artists centred round Dante Gabriel Rossetti in the early 1850s reflects a widespread reaction against the ‘academic’ style favoured by the Royal Academy, a style dominated by heavy chiaroscuro, in contrast to the pure colours of earlier art. Rossetti (like Ruskin) was already a friend of B.’s at this time, and B. almost certainly read Ruskin’s pamphlet Pre-Raphaelitism (1851), in part an extended defence of the Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic.
The critical revaluation of medieval art prompted by the work of Schlegel, Rio, Ruskin and others was not, however, universal, least of all in Italy itself; and the poem laments the fact that many frescoes had been allowed to deteriorate or even whitewashed over (ll. 185–92n.). Korg (see headnote, Composition) notes that the Bargello Chapel, ‘decorated with frescoes by Giotto showing scenes from Inferno and Paradiso, had been divided horizontally to make two rooms, the walls … whitewashed, and the upper portion … used as a prison’ (p. 105). Korg also points out that B.’s friend Seymour Kirkup, who verified his Ghirlandaio find, led the campaign to restore the frescoes. There was, in addition, a theoretical challenge to the notion of the supremacy of Christian art in Matthew Arnold’s Preface to his 1853 Poems. Arnold argues that Greek artists are superior to their modern successors precisely because of their attention to the overall design of their work: ‘They regarded the whole; we regard the parts. With them, the action predominated over the expression of it; with us, the expression predominates over the action’ (R. H. Super ed., Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold [Ann Arbor, 1960], i 5). The poem’s discussion of the relative merits of perfection and imperfection may be an attempt to restate the case for Christian art in the face of Arnold’s attempt at a neo-classical revival (see l. 146n.; and cp. headnote to Cleon [p. 563] ).
(ii) Political
The speaker ends the poem by prophesying the end of Austrian rule in Tuscany and the establishment of an Italian Republic with Florence as its capital (ll. 249–88). During 1848 and 1849 uprisings throughout Italy had led to the establishment of a number of republics, including a restored Roman Republic under a triumvirate including Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–72), whom B. had met and corresponded with during Mazzini’s period of exile in London (see headnote to Italy in England [p. 245]). These risings were, however, defeated, and Austrian rule was restored in Tuscany, which was occupied by Austrian troops until 1855. In the aftermath of these defeats there were ideological conflicts between the partisans of Italian nationalism, and Mazzini’s advocacy of direct action and unswerving commitment to republican and democratic politics placed him in conflict with those who looked to foreign powers (especially France) to effect Italy’s liberation. In spite of her husband’s friendship with Mazzini, EBB. became disillusioned with him in direct proportion to her increasing faith in Napoleon III as the potential saviour of Italy; her poetic meditation on the events of these years, Casa Guidi Windows (1851), characterizes Mazzini as an ‘extreme theorist’ who will ‘stand apart’ from the broadly based national movement of the future (ii 573, 568; see also l. 260n. below). B. in contrast seems to have maintained a sympathetic interest in Mazzini’s politics: he owned a number of Mazzini’s publications, and lent Charles Eliot Norton a copy of his pamphlet Foi et Avenir [Faith and the Future] in Nov. 1850 (Letters of Charles Eliot Norton [Boston 1913] i 72). The speaker of the poem uses explicitly Mazzinian language in his description of the future Italian republic (see l. 285n.). The association between Giotto’s Campanile (bell-tower) and the splendour of Republican Florence is emphasized in Fantozzi (p. 320): ‘La Repubblica fiorentina, sempre magnifica e splendida nelle opere di pubblica utilità e decoro, ne ordinò la fondazione [del campanile] al celebre Giotto nel 1334’ [The Florentine Republic, always splendidly ostentatious in works of public utility and display, commanded the construction of the bell-tower from the celebrated Giotto in 1334]. See also l. 264n.
Parallels in B.
The most important precursor to the poem in terms of its artistic subject is Pictor Ignotus (p. 226) whose speaker is an obscure early painter (probably Florentine although this is not specifically stated), and whose paintings suffer the fate of those described in Old Pictures: see ll. 41–8n. Note, however, that Pictor is the study of an artist who colludes in his paintings’ fate, whereas B. suggests in this poem that the spirits of the old masters are injured and indignant at their neglect. The poem is one of a number in M & W on the subject of painting. Like Fra Lippo (p. 477), Old Pictures contains an account of the development of art; but, unlike Fra Lippo, this poem sees art as developing not by imitation of reality, but through a recognition of the limitations of a perfect representation of the world.
The ‘doctrine of the imperfect’ is a recurring motif of B.’s work: it shapes the evolutionary politics (and aesthetics) of Sordello (see e.g. iii 811–28, I 582), and is a major constitutive principle of the dramatic monologue form which B. developed in the 1840s, in which partial or one-sided perspectives replace authorial omniscience or the claim to offer a complete vision. Imperfection also has an important influence on B.’s theology: cp. CE & ED (III 34) and Saul (III 491). In other poems the theme is handled with an ironic or ambivalent edge, notably in A Grammarian (p. 586); in Cleon (p. 563) and Two in the Campagna (p. 556) it has a tragic dimension, although Cleon also exposes what B. thought of as the limitations of the Greek world-view, its inability to recognize what the Fates (made drunk by wine) proclaim in one of B.’s last works: ‘Manhood—the actual? Nay, praise the potential! / (Bound upon bound, foot it around!) / What is? No, what may be—sing! that’s Man’s essential!’ (Apollo and the Fates: A Prologue [Parleyings, 1887] 211–14). As this example indicates, the theme remains a constant preoccupation for B. throughout his career.
Contemporary Italian politics is an occasional theme of B.’s work—see head-note to Pippa Passes (p. 89), and Italy in England (p. 245)—but a perennial one of EBB.’s, especially during the last decade of her life. Julia Markus (see above, Composition) suggests that Old Pictures should be read as a kind of riposte to EBB.’s Casa Guidi Windows. B. returned to the theme in Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau (1871), whose speaker, a thinly disguised portrait of Napoleon III, attempts to justify his policy towards Italy; this poem, too, may be said to answer EBB.’s Poems Before Congress (1860).
1
The morn when first it thunders in March,
The eel in the pond gives a leap, they say.
As I leaned and looked over the aloed arch
Of the villa-gate, this warm March day,
5 No flash snapt, no dumb thunder rolled
In the valley beneath, where, white and wide,
Washed by the morning’s water-gold,
Florence lay out on the mountain-side.
2
River and bridge and street and square
10 Lay mine, as much at my beck and call,
Through the live translucent bath of air,
As the sights in a magic crystal ball.
And of all I saw and of all I praised,
The most to praise and the best to see,
15 Was the startling bell-tower Giotto raised:
But why did it more than startle me?
3
Giotto, how, with that soul of yours,
Could you play me false who loved you so?
Some slights if a certain heart endures
20 It feels, I would have your fellows know!
’Faith—I perceive not why I should care
To break a silence that suits them best,
But the thing grows somewhat hard to bear
When I find a Giotto join the rest.
4
25 On the arch where olives overhead
Print the blue sky with twig and leaf,
(That sharp-curled leaf they never shed)
’Twixt the aloes I used to lean in chief,
And mark through the winter afternoons,
30 By a gift God grants me now and then,
In the mild decline of those suns like moons,
Who walked in Florence, besides her men.
5
They might chirp and chaffer, come and go
For pleasure or profit, her men alive—
35 My business was hardly with them, I trow,
But with empty cells of the human hive;
—With the chapter-room, the cloister-porch,
The church’s apsis, aisle or nave,
Its crypt, one fingers along with a torch—
40 Its face, set full for the sun to shave.
6
Wherever a fresco peels and drops,
Wherever an outline weakens and wanes
Till the latest life in the painting stops,
Stands One whom each fainter pulse-tick pains!
45 One, wishful each scrap should clutch its brick,
Each tinge not wholly escape the plaster,
—A lion who dies of an ass’s kick,
The wronged great soul of an ancient Master.
For oh, this world and the wrong it does!
50 They are safe in heaven with their backs to it,
The Michaels and Rafaels, you hum and buzz
Round the works of, you of the little wit!
Do their eyes contract to the earth’s old scope,
Now that they see God face to face,
55 And have all attained to be poets, I hope?
’Tis their holiday now, in any case.
8
Much they reck of your praise and you!
But the wronged great souls—can they be quit
Of a world where all their work is to do,
60 Where you style them, you of the little wit,
Old Master this and Early the other,
Not dreaming that Old and New are fellows,
That a younger succeeds to an elder brother,
Da Vincis derive in good time from Dellos.
9
65 And here where your praise would yield returns
And a handsome word or two give help,
Here, after your kind, the mastiff girns
And the puppy pack of poodles yelp.
What, not a word for Stefano there
70 —Of brow once prominent and starry,
Called Nature’s ape and the world’s despair
For his peerless painting (see Vasari)?
There he stands now. Study, my friends,
What a man’s work comes to! so he plans it,
75 Performs it, perfects it, makes amends
For the toiling and moiling, and then sic transit!
Happier the thrifty blind-folk labour,
With upturned eye while the hand is busy,
Not sidling a glance at the coin of their neighbour!
80 ’Tis looking downward makes one dizzy.
11
If you knew their work you would deal your dole.
May I take upon me to instruct you?
When Greek Art ran and reached the goal,
Thus much had the world to boast in fructu—
85 The truth of Man, as by God first spoken,
Which the actual generations garble,
Was re-uttered,—and Soul (which Limbs betoken)
And Limbs (Soul informs) were made new in marble.
12
So you saw yourself as you wished you were,
90 As you might have been, as you cannot be;
And bringing your own shortcomings there,
You grew content in your poor degree
With your little power, by those statues’ godhead,
And your little scope, by their eyes’ full sway,
95 And your little grace, by their grace embodied,
And your little date, by their forms that stay.
13
You would fain be kinglier, say than I am?
Even so, you would not sit like Theseus.
You’d fain be a model? the Son of Priam
100 Has yet the advantage in arms’ and knees’ use.
You’re wroth—can you slay your snake like Apollo?
You’re grieved—still Niobe’s the grander!
You live—there’s the Racer’s frieze to follow—
You die—there’s the dying Alexander.
105 So, testing your weakness by their strength,
Your meagre charms by their rounded beauty,
Measured by Art in your breadth and length,
You learn—to submit is the worsted’s duty.
—When I say “you” ’tis the common soul,
110 The collective, I mean—the race of Man
That receives life in parts to live in a whole,
And grow here according to God’s own plan.
15
Growth came when, looking your last on them all,
You turned your eyes inwardly one fine day
115 And cried with a start—What if we so small
Are greater, ay, greater the while than they!
Are they perfect of lineament, perfect of stature?
In both, of such lower types are we
Precisely because of our wider nature;
120 For time, theirs—ours, for eternity.
To-day’s brief passion limits their range,
It seethes with the morrow for us and more.
They are perfect—how else? they shall never change:
We are faulty—why not? we have time in store.
125 The Artificer’s hand is not arrested
With us—we are rough-hewn, no-wise polished:
They stand for our copy, and, once invested
With all they can teach, we shall see them abolished.
17
’Tis a life-long toil till our lump be leaven—
130 The better! what’s come to perfection perishes.
Things learned on earth, we shall practise in heaven.
Works done least rapidly, Art most cherishes.
Thyself shall afford the example, Giotto!
Thy one work, not to decrease or diminish,
135 Done at a stroke, was just (was it not?) “O!”
Thy great Campanile is still to finish.
18
Is it true, we are now, and shall be hereafter,
And what—is depending on life’s one minute?
Hails heavenly cheer or infernal laughter
140 Our first step out of the gulf or in it?
And Man, this step within his endeavour,
His face, have no more play and action
Than joy which is crystallized for ever,
Or grief, an eternal petrifaction!
19
145 On which I conclude, that the early painters,
To cries of “Greek Art and what more wish you?”—
Replied, “Become now self-acquainters,
And paint man, man,—whatever the issue!
Make new hopes shine through the flesh they fray,
150 New fears aggrandise the rags and tatters.
So bring the invisible full into play,
Let the visible go to the dogs—what matters?”
20
Give these, I say, full honour and glory
For daring so much, before they well did it.
155 The first of the new, in our race’s story,
Beats the last of the old, ’tis no idle quiddit.
The worthies began a revolution
Which if on the earth we intend to acknowledge
Honour them now—(ends my allocution)
160 Nor confer our degree when the folks leave college.
There’s a fancy some lean to and others hate—
That, when this life is ended, begins
New work for the soul in another state,
Where it strives and gets weary, loses and wins—
165 Where the strong and the weak, this world’s congeries,
Repeat in large what they practised in small,
Through life after life in unlimited series;
Only the scale’s to be changed, that’s all.
22
Yet I hardly know. When a soul has seen
170 By the means of Evil that Good is best,
And through earth and its noise, what is heaven’s serene,—
When its faith in the same has stood the test—
Why, the child grown man, you burn the rod,
The uses of labour are surely done.
175 There remaineth a rest for the people of God,
And I have had troubles enough for one.
But at any rate I have loved the season
Of Art’s spring-birth so dim and dewy,
My sculptor is Nicolo the Pisan;
180 My painter—who but Cimabue?
Nor ever was man of them all indeed,
From these to Ghiberti and Ghirlandajo,
Could say that he missed my critic-meed.
So now to my special grievance—heigh ho!
24
185 Their ghosts now stand, as I said before,
Watching each fresco flaked and rasped,
Blocked up, knocked out, or whitewashed o’er
—No getting again what the church has grasped!
The works on the wall must take their chance,
190 “Works never conceded to England’s thick clime!”
(I hope they prefer their inheritance
Of a bucketful of Italian quick-lime.)
25
When they go at length, with such a shaking
Of heads o’er the old delusions, sadly
195 Each master his way through the black streets taking,
Where many a lost work breathes though badly—
Why don’t they bethink them of who has merited?
Why not reveal, while their pictures dree
Such doom, that a captive’s to be out-ferreted?
200 Why do they never remember me?
Not that I expect the great Bigordi
Nor Sandro to hear me, chivalric, bellicose;
Nor wronged Lippino—and not a word I
Say of a scrap of Fra Angelico’s.
205 But are you too fine, Taddeo Gaddi,
To grant me a taste of your intonaco—
Some Jerome that seeks the heaven with a sad eye?
No churlish saint, Lorenzo Monaco?
27
Could not the ghost with the close red cap,
210 My Pollajolo, the twice a craftsman,
Save me a sample, give me the hap
Of a muscular Christ that shows the draughtsman?
No Virgin by him, the somewhat petty,
Of finical touch and tempera crumbly—
215 Could not Alesso Baldovinetti
Contribute so much, I ask him humbly?
28
Margheritone of Arezzo,
With the grave-clothes garb and swaddling barret,
(Why purse up mouth and beak in a pet so,
220 You bald, saturnine, poll-clawed parrot?)
No poor glimmering Crucifixion,
Where in the foreground kneels the donor?
If such remain, as in my conviction,
The hoarding does you but little honour.
29
225 They pass: for them the panels may thrill,
The tempera grow alive and tinglish—
Rot or are left to the mercies still
Of dealers and stealers, Jews and the English!
Seeing mere money’s worth in their prize,
230 Who sell it to some one calm as Zeno
At naked Art, and in ecstacies
Before some clay-cold, vile Carlino!
30
No matter for these! But Giotto, you,
Have you allowed, as the town-tongues babble it,
235 Never! it shall not be counted true—
That a certain precious little tablet
Which Buonarroti eyed like a lover,—
Buried so long in oblivion’s womb,
Was left for another than I to discover,—
240 Turns up at last, and to whom?—to whom?
31
I, that have haunted the dim San Spirito,
(Or was it rather the Ognissanti?)
Stood on the altar-steps, patient and weary too!
Nay, I shall have it yet, detur amanti!
245 My Koh-i-noor—or (if that’s a platitude)
Jewel of Giamschid, the Persian Sofi’s eye!
So, in anticipative gratitude,
What if I take up my hope and prophesy?
32
When the hour is ripe, and a certain dotard
250 Pitched, no parcel that needs invoicing,
To the worse side of the Mont St. Gothard,
Have, to begin by way of rejoicing,
None of that shooting the sky (blank cartridge),
No civic guards, all plumes and lacquer,
255 Hunting Radetsky’s soul like a partridge
Over Morello with squib and cracker.
33
We’ll shoot this time better game and bag ’em hot—
No display at the stone of Dante,
But a sober kind of Witan-agemot
260 (“Casa Guidi,” quod videas ante)
To ponder Freedom restored to Florence,
How Art may return that departed with her.
Go, hated house, go each trace of the Loraine’s!
And bring us the days of Orgagna hither.
34
265 How we shall prologuise, how we shall perorate,
Say fit things upon art and history—
Set truth at blood-heat and the false at a zero rate,
Make of the want of the age no mystery!
Contrast the fructuous and sterile eras,
270 Show, monarchy its uncouth cub licks
Out of the bear’s shape to the chimæra’s—
Pure Art’s birth being still the republic’s!
35
Then one shall propose (in a speech, curt Tuscan,
Sober, expurgate, spare of an “issimo,”)
275 Ending our half-told tale of Cambuscan,
Turning the Bell-tower’s alt to altissimo.
And fine as the beak of a young beccaccia
The Campanile, the Duomo’s fit ally,
Soars up in gold its full fifty braccia,
280 Completing Florence, as Florence, Italy.
36
Shall I be alive that morning the scaffold
Is broken away, and the long-pent fire
Like the golden hope of the world unbaffled
Springs from its sleep, and up goes the spire—
285 As, “God and the People” plain for its motto,
Thence the new tricolor flaps at the sky?
Foreseeing the day that vindicates Giotto
And Florence together, the first am I!
Title.] Opus Magistri Jocti (H proof ). The meaning of the phrase is ‘A Work of Master Giotto’s’. In one of the notes to her translation of Vasari’s chapter on Giotto, Mrs Foster points out that his picture of the Stigmatæ, originally in S. Francesco in Pisa, had been moved ‘to the principal chapel of the Campo Santo [cemetery], where it was seen by Morrona, who discovered the name of Giotto on it, much injured by restorations. It is now at Paris, in the Louvre, whither it was transported by Napoleon; the name of the painter is on the cornice, in letters of gold, thus: “OPUS JOCTI FLORENTINI” ’ (Foster i 100–1n.).
1–2. We have not found a source for this weather proverb, which opens the poem with a signal of spring; the speaker goes on (ll. 3–16) to say that, although there was no thunderstorm on the morning he looked out over Florence, the sight of Giotto’s bell-tower ‘more than startle[d]’ him. The eel’s leap is a natural response to the coming of spring; the speaker’s feelings are a more complex response to the political, artistic, and personal regeneration for which he yearns. Cp. (noting ‘water-gold’ in l. 7) the moment in Flight of the Duchess which forms a symbolic prelude to the Duchess’s escape: ‘Well, early in autumn, at first winter-warning, / When the stag had to break with his foot, of a morning, / A drinking-hole out of the fresh tender ice / That covered the pond till the sun, in a trice, / Loosening it, let out a ripple of gold, / And another and another, and faster and faster, / Till, dimpling to blindness, the wide water rolled’ (ll. 216–22, II 305–6). 3. aloed arch: an archway covered with aloes, whose tenacious climbing is mentioned in Sordello iv 753–4, 800–5 (I 638, 640). Leaning out of a window or balcony is used as an image of creativity in Ring i 469–96, in which B. describes how he ‘fused [his] live soul’ with the ‘inert stuff ’ of the Old Yellow Book; note however that this scene takes place at Casa Guidi, i.e. within Florence rather than in the hills above it.
4. villa-gate: the Brownings did not live in a villa, but their friend Robert Bulwer Lytton (‘Owen Meredith’) rented the Villa Brichieri at Bellosguardo, overlooking Florence, in 1853; see headnote to Up at a Villa (III 143). This is the villa later rented by the Brownings’ close friend Isa Blagden. this warm March day: almost certainly March 1853; see headnote, Composition.
7. Washed by] And washed by (1863–88). Cp., noting ‘bath of air’ in l. 11, the landscape of ‘England’s best’ in The Inn Album i 50–2: ‘He leans into a living glory-bath / Of air and light where seems to float and move / The wooded watered country’; and Ring i 685–6: ‘the renovating wash / O’ the water’. Oxford suggests that the painterly sense of ‘washed’ might also be implied. the morning’s] the morning (1868–88). water-gold: pale sunlight (not in OED, and not hyphenated in subsequent editions).
12. magic crystal ball: one of the instruments of fortune-telling and mediumship; cp. Mr. Sludge 181–4 (pp. 789–90): ‘So, David holds the circle, rules the roast, / Narrates the vision, peeps in the glass ball, / Sets to the spirit-writing, hears the raps, / As the case may be.’ In her Norton edition of Aurora Leigh (New York and London 1996) Margaret Reynolds notes that the Brownings saw a crystal ball belonging to Lord Stanhope at a lunch given by Euphrasia Fanny Haworth in July 1852 (vi 169–70n., p. 187). For EBB.’s interest in spiritualism and associated phenomena see headnotes to Mesmerism (III 475) and Mr Sludge (pp. 772–3).
15. Giotto di Bondone (1267–1337), a crucial figure in the history of Florentine art, designed the bell-tower (It. Campanile) in Florence, but his design was never completed; according to Fantozzi it was left at around three-quarters of the projected height by his successors. This unfinished bell-tower is a key motif of the poem; see ll. 273–88 below.
17–24. Anticipating the section of the poem (l. 193 ff.) in which B. fancifully rebukes the early Florentine painters for ignoring him and allowing their works to be acquired by collectors who do not appreciate them; here, the crowning insult is that Giotto has joined this ‘conspiracy’.
19. Some slights] There be slights (H proof but not H proof 2).
20. It feels] Yet it feels (H proof, 1863–88); this is a rare example of B. reverting to a reading in H proof.
21. ’Faith—I perceive] I’ faith, I perceive (1863–88). ‘’Faith’ is a contraction of a mild oath or expletive, ‘in faith’, here meaning ‘truly’.
22. a silence that suits them best: the pronoun refers to Giotto’s ‘fellows’ or contemporaries, with the suggestion that they are best left in ‘silence’ or obscurity. 25–8. The syntax runs: ‘I used to lean in chief [habitually] ’twixt the aloes on the arch [of the gate]’.
27. leaf they never] leaf which they never (1863–88).
32. who walked in Florence: i.e. the ghosts of the early Florentine painters, who are ‘walking’ the city; they are not at peace because of the mistreatment of their work described in the next two stanzas.
33. chaffer: to haggle or barter.
35. I trow: I believe (archaic).
36. the human hive: the comparison between human society and a beehive is a traditional one; cp. Christmas-Eve 560–1 (III 69–70). One of B.’s favourite books when he was a young man was Bernard de Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees (1714), which forms the subject of the first of the Parleyings (1887).
37–8. The first line refers to monastic, the second to ecclesiastical architecture: a ‘chapter-room’ is a room where the ‘chapter’, or order of monks would assemble on formal occasions; the ‘apsis’ (more usually ‘apse’) of a church is a recess at the end of the aisle or nave. B.’s very unusual spelling occurs in Mrs Jameson’s Legends of the Madonna (1852); Jameson was a close friend of the Brownings during their early years in Italy (see headnote).
39. crypt: cp. B.’s first letter to EBB. giving his response to missing the possibility of meeting her: ‘I feel as at some untoward passage in my travels—as if I had been close, so close, to some world’s-wonder in chapel or crypt, .. only a screen to push and I might have entered’ (10 Jan. 1845, Correspondence x 17).
41–8. Cp. Dickens on the Cathedral of Parma: ‘The decayed and mutilated paintings with which this church is covered, have, to my thinking, a remarkably mournful and depressing influence. It is miserable to see great works of art— something of the Souls of Painters—perishing and fading away, like human forms’ (Pictures from Italy [1846; ed. D. Paroissien, 1973] 105). Cp. also Pictor Ignotus, esp. ll. 63–9 (p. 231): ‘The sanctuary’s gloom at least shall ward / Vain tongues from where my pictures stand apart; / Only prayer breaks the silence of the shrine / While, blackening in the daily candle smoke, / They moulder on the dark wall’s travertine, / ’Mid echoes the light footsteps never woke. / So die, my pictures; surely, gently die!’ Ruskin notes in a letter to The Times of 7 Jan. 1847: ‘I had seen in Venice the noblest works of Veronese painted over with flake-white with a brush fit for tarring ships; I had seen in Florence Angelico’s highest inspiration rotted and seared into fragments of old wood, burnt into blisters, or blotted into glutinous maps of mildew’ (Works xii 398).
45. its brick] the brick (1863–88).
47. Alluding to Aesop’s fable in which the wounded lion feels the ass’s kick as the final indignity before his death; B. knew this story from Samuel Croxall’s version of Aesop: ‘His mother used to read Croxall’s Fables to his little sister and him. The story contained in them of a lion who was kicked to death by an ass affected him so painfully that he could no longer endure the sight of the book; and as he dared not destroy it, he buried it between the stuffing and the woodwork of an old dining-room chair, where it stood for lost, at all events for the time being’ (Orr Life 26–7). The asses here are the church authorities who neglect the masterpieces of early religious painting; cp. ll. 185–92 and see headnote. B. may have connected the neglect of the early painters with that of his own work through this image: he had almost certainly read James Russell Lowell’s sympathetic review essay, ‘Browning’s Plays and Poems’, in North American Review lxvi (Apr. 1848), in which Lowell remarks: ‘there is scarce any truly living book which does not bear the print of that hoof which Pindar would have Olympicized into the spurner of dying lions’ (p. 359).
49–64. The speaker’s fanciful conception is that great painters such as Michelangelo and Raphael no longer need the care and attention that their works receive, since the recognition they gained on earth has freed them from concern with these works or with earthly reputation; they are enjoying a transcendent immortality, whereas the neglected early painters are condemned to haunt the sites of their work, hoping for a similar recognition and release.
51. Michaels and Rafaels: Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564) and Raffaello Sanzio (1483–1520), two of the triumvirate of Italian High Renaissance Art (the third, Leonardo da Vinci, is mentioned at l. 64).
54. see God face to face: cp. 1 Corinthians xiii 12: ‘For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.’
55. The speaker implies that poetry is the highest of the arts; cp. the speaker’s claims for music in ll. 43–50 of Abt Vogler (p. 766). Michelangelo was in fact a poet as well as an artist; a number of his sonnets were translated into English by Wordsworth. B. also refers to the tradition that Raphael wrote ‘a century of sonnets’ in One Word More 5 (p. 602).
57. reck of: care for.
59. all their work is] their work is all (1863–88); B. noted this reading on H proof and in the lists he sent to D. G. Rossetti and James T. Fields: see headnote, Text. On balance we think this is a revision rather than a correction, and have not emended 1855.
61. Old Master this … Early the Other: unknown artists are occasionally referred to as ‘Master’ (e.g. ‘Master of the Barberini Panels’). ‘Early’ is a way of indicating an artist’s place in the history of the form.
62–4. Cp. the account of the development of poetry and society in Sordello v 80 ff., esp. l. 105: ‘An elder poet’s in the younger’s place’ (I 662). Artists like Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) are said to ‘derive’ from more obscure figures such as Dello di Niccolo Delli (c. 1404–71), who made a living by painting decorative scenes onto chests and other items of furniture. As Foster points out, Dello ‘is probably the diminutive of Leonardello’ (i 327).
63. That a younger] A younger (1863–88); B. noted this reading on H proof and in the lists he sent to D. G. Rossetti and James T. Fields: see headnote, Text. On balance we think this is a revision rather than a correction, and have not emended 1855.
65. would yield] might yield (1863–88).
67. Here,] Why, (H proof ).
67–8. mastiff … poodles: scornful images for art critics and historians who disparage early Italian painting: the ‘mastiff’ would represent a ‘heavyweight’ art critic, and the ‘puppy-pack of poodles’ his younger followers and imitators. B. regularly resorted to animal imagery to characterize critics, whether of art or literature; cp. his response to the hostile reviews of M & W cited in Appendix C, p. 893.
67. girns: snarl, show one’s teeth.
69–72. Vasari describes the Florentine painter Stefano (1301?–50?), a ‘disciple’ of Giotto, as ‘an artist of such excellence, that he not only surpassed all those who had preceded him in the art, but left even his master, Giotto himself, far behind’ (Foster i 133). Vasari goes on to describe some of his paintings, commenting in particular on their early use of foreshortening and perspective, and adds that his ‘brother artists’ called him ‘ “the ape of nature” ’ [‘scimia [sic] della natura’] because of his skill (ibid. 135). See also headnote, Sources.
70. Cp. Pictor Ignotus 34–5 (p. 229), and In a Balcony iii 83–4 (III 439); in nineteenth-century physiognomy a prominent brow was considered a sign of high intelligence, but B. also intends an allusion to a more mystic or occult sign of greatness, like the aura of a saint.
73. There he stands now] There stands the Master (1863–88).
76. toiling and moiling: an expression meaning ‘to work hard, to drudge’; cp. Doctor— in DI2 (1880) 34: ‘A lawyer wins repute—Having to toil and moil’. then sic transit!] emended from ‘there’s its transit!’ in 1855; B. corrected this evident misprint on H proof and in the lists he sent to D. G. Rossetti and James T. Fields: see headnote, Text. The allusion is to a phrase used in the ceremony for the coronation of a new Pope; three bundles of tow are burned in front of him, and the Master of Ceremonies says: ‘Sancte Pater sic transit gloria mundi’ [‘Holy Father, thus passes away the glory of this world’].
77–80. The ‘blind-folk’ symbolize those artists who are indifferent to earthly reward and their status relative to others (their ‘upturned eye’ is fixed on heaven), in contrast to painters such as Stefano who are self-conscious about the value of their work and envious of their neighbours’ accomplishments. Oxford suggests that the image derives from schools for the blind (the first of which in London dates from 1799). Cp. B.’s insistence that ‘a poet’s affair is with God, to whom he is accountable, and of whom is his reward: look elsewhere, and you find misery enough’ (letter to Ruskin: see Appendix B, p. 882), and (noting the ‘upturned eye’) How It Strikes 66–8 (p. 442).
80. downward makes] downward that makes (1863–88, except 1880 which agrees with 1855). It is rare for a reading in a volume of selections to revert to the original.
81.] in quotation marks, 1863–88. deal your dole: continuing the metaphor of alms-giving associated with the ‘blind-folk’; a ‘dole’ is a portion or charitable gift. 83–160. For the possible sources of the contrast between Christian and Pagan art developed in this ‘allocution’ (l. 159) see headnote, Sources.
84. in fructu: cp. Deuteronomy xxx 9: ‘And the Lord thy God will make thee plenteous in every work of thine hand, in the fruit of thy body, and in the fruit of thy cattle, and in the fruit of thy land, for good’; in the Latin (Vulgate) version the phrase ‘in the fruit of ’ is ‘in fructu’.
85–96. The triumph of classical Greek art (principally, as the following lines make clear, its sculpture) was to rediscover the perfection of God’s original creation of the human form, giving ideal images, in imperishable marble, of the unity of flesh and spirit which is obscured in the ‘actual generations’ of the human race. Lawrence Poston (SBC iii.2 [1975] 124–5) suggests the influence of a passage in Hazlitt’s essay ‘On Poetry in General’ from his Lectures on the English Poets (1818), contrasting Raphael’s cartoons on the Scriptures with Greek art: ‘It is for want of some such resting place for the imagination that the Greek statues are little else than specious forms. They are marble to the touch and to the heart. They have not an informing principle within them. In their faultless excellence they appear sufficient to themselves. By their beauty they are raised above the frailties of passion or suffering. By their beauty they are deified. But they are not objects of religious faith to us, and their forms are a reproach to common humanity. They seem to have no sympathy with us, and not to want our admiration.’ Cp. the description of the statues in the grounds of Taurello Salinguerra’s palace at Ferrara in Sordello iv 141–69 (I 602–4), and In a Balcony 253–9 (III 416).
88. were made new] made new (1863–88).
91.] Earth here, rebuked by Olympus there: (1863–88); B. noted this reading on H proof and in the lists he sent to D. G. Rossetti and James T. Fields: see head-note, Text. This (along with the consequent reading in the next line) is clearly a revision rather than a correction, and we have not emended 1855.
92. You grew] And grew (1863–88); B. noted this reading on H proof and in the lists he sent to D. G. Rossetti and James T. Fields: see prec. note.
94. scope … eyes: punning on the origin of ‘scope’ in the Greek ‘skopos’ (‘watcher’).
96. date: lifespan.
98. sit like Theseus: Theseus was a legendary King of Athens; according to Thomas, B. is thinking here of the carving of the seated Theseus on the east pediment of the Parthenon, now in the British Museum (see pp. 186–7 for an illustration). The statue was described by Charles Knight in his Guide Cards to the Antiquities in the British Museum (1840) as combining ‘ideal beauty with the truth of nature’ and as ‘unquestionably finished in the very perfection of art’.
99. You’d fain be] You’d prove (1868–88). model: a type of physical beauty. Son of Priam: Paris was the son of Priam, King of Troy; Thomas suggests that B. is referring to the Paris of the Aeginetan Sculptures, now in the Glyptothek in Munich (Thomas p. 186). The statue in question depicts Paris in a kneeling position firing an arrow, with his ‘arms’ and ‘knees’ prominent.
101. wroth: angry (archaic). Apollo: Apollo slew the Python at Delphi with an arrow, a feat commemorated in the institution of the Pythian games; variants of this legend are found in Sordello (i 928, I 456) and in Pippa Passes (Pippa’s third song, ‘A king lived long ago’, pp. 151–3). The Apollo Belvedere in the Vatican’s Museo Pio-Clementino depicts Apollo in the immediate aftermath of this feat; cp. Byron’s description of it in Childe Harold, iv, st. 161. In 1880 B. added the following note at the end of the poem, on page 210, which has only the last stanza: ‘The space left here tempts me to a word on the line about Apollo the snakeslayer, which my friend Professor Colvin condemns, believing that the god of the Belvedere grasps no bow, but the Ægis, as described in the 15th Iliad’. Sidney Colvin (1845–1928) was at the time Slade Professor of Fine Art at Cambridge; his friendship with B. dates from the early 1870s. B. counters Colvin’s theory, correlating the text of the Iliad with the physical gestures of the statue, and concluding: ‘The conjecture of Flaxman that the statue was suggested by the bronze Apollo Alexikakos of Kalamis, mentioned by Pausanias, remains probable,—though the “hardness” which Cicero considers to distinguish the artist’s workmanship from that of Muron is not by any means apparent in our marble copy, if it be one.’ The pagination of 1884 (rev. reissue of 1880) differs from that of 1880; the poem finishes near the bottom of page 165, and the note consequently runs across to the following page, making nonsense of B.’s comment about there being space to fit it in. 1884 also revises ‘bronze Apollo’ to ‘bronze Apollon’; the whole episode marks B.’s increasingly high opinion of himself as a classical scholar in the 1870s and 1880s, in the wake of his translations of Aeschylus and Euripides.
102. Niobe boasted that her seven sons and seven daughters were more beautiful than Venus’s children Apollo and Artemis, who retaliated by slaying them with arrows. Niobe wept so copiously that she was transformed into a fountain (see Ovid, Metamorphoses, bk vi). A statue of her mourning the death of her children is in the Uffizi. Cp. Casa Guidi Windows i 30–5.
103. the Racers’ frieze: the Parthenon Frieze in the British Museum depicts a horse race.
104. the dying Alexander: there is a bust of the dying Alexander the Great in the Uffizi in Florence.
108. The ‘lesson’ of Greek art is one of resignation: the living, ‘worsted’ in the contest between the ideal image of art and the imperfection of actual existence, accept the limitations of life. The moral debility of this attitude is suggested by the conclusion of The Statue and the Bust (III 358–9), in which the two lovers substitute images of themselves for the selfhood they have failed to achieve. the worsted’s duty] a mortal’s duty (1863–88).
109–12. With this view of the ‘collective’ nature of human progress, and the place of art in ‘God’s own plan’, cp. part v of Paracelsus (esp. ll. 729–824, I 302–6) and bk. v of Sordello: cp. esp. ll. 95–6: ‘collective man / Outstrips the individual!’ (I 662). Cp. also By the Fire-Side 246–50 (p. 475).
110. The collective: either ‘the collective soul’ (in apposition to ‘common’), or a noun for the mass of humanity; the latter usage belongs to ‘the new Democratic consciousness of [the early nineteenth century]’, with examples in OED from Cobbett and Carlyle (Williams 60). Cp. In a Balcony iii 96–7n. (III 440).
112. God’s own plan] God’s clear plan (1863–88).
113–20. For the contrast between Christian and Pagan art and the ‘doctrine of imperfection’ in this and other poems by B., see headnote, Sources and Parallels in B.
116.] Be greater and grander the while than they! (1863–88, except that from 1870 the line ends ‘than they?’; in H proof the original version of the line also ended with a question mark).
117–18. perfect of stature? / In both] perfect of stature, / And in both (H proof ). The question postponed here in H proof is relocated to l. 120: see next note.
120. for eternity.] for eternity? (H proof ).
121–2. In classical art the present moment is all that matters, whereas for modern art the present ‘seethes with’ the prospect of change and growth. This sense of ‘seethes’ as ‘To be in a state of inward agitation, turmoil, or “ferment” ’ (OED 5) anticipates the image of the ‘leaven’ in l. 129.
125–6. Echoing the wording, although not the thought, of Hamlet V ii 210–11: ‘There’s a divinity that shapes our ends / Rough-hew them how we will’. Cp. the image of God as a potter in Rabbi Ben Ezra 151f. (p. 660).
127. They stand … copy: they provide us with a model for imitation. They stand] They are set (H proof but not H proof 2).
129. Cp. Galatians v 9: ‘A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump.’
130. what’s come to perfection perishes: cp. Ruskin’s argument in ‘The Nature of Gothic’ (The Stones of Venice ii [1853]: see headnote, Sources): ‘the demand for perfection is always a sign of a misunderstanding of the ends of art … The building of the bird and the bee need not express anything like this [desire for change]. It is perfect and unchanging. But just because we are something better than birds or bees, our building must confess that we have not reached the perfection we can imagine, and cannot rest in the condition we have attained’ (Works x 202, 214). 131. Things learned] Things half-learned (H proof but not H proof 2). in heaven] in Heaven (1863–65).
132. least rapidly] less rapidly (1884). Substantive variants unique to this ed. are very rare; this one is probably, but not certainly, a misprint.
133–6. The anecdote in question is in Vasari’s Life of Giotto. Pope Benedict IX sent a ‘courtier’ to assess whether or not Giotto should be asked to paint some pictures in St Peter’s: ‘He declared the purpose of the pope, and the manner in which that pontiff desired to avail himself of his assistance, and finally, requested to have a drawing, that he might send it to his holiness. Giotto, who was very courteous, took a sheet of paper, and a pencil dipped in a red colour; then, resting his elbow on his side, to form a sort of compass, with one turn of the hand he drew a circle, so perfect and exact that it was a marvel to behold. This done, he turned, smiling to the courtier, saying, “Here is your drawing” ’ (Foster i 102–3). The circle is an ancient symbol of perfection, and eternity. B. would have known that the introduction of the concept of mathematical zero was Arabic and post-classical. For the ‘great Campanile’ see l. 15n.
133. shall afford ] shalt afford (1868–88).
136. Thy great] While thy great (H proof but not H proof 2).
137–44. Since human life is a state of uncertainty, poised between salvation and damnation, art should reflect the ‘play and action’ of this condition, and not the eternal fixity of the next world. For the ‘Christian aesthetic’ of this argument, see headnote, Sources; and cp. Bishop Blougram 693–8 (p. 324).
137. Is it true, we] Is it true that we (1863–88).
138.] But what and where depend on life’s minute? (1863–88).
141. And Man, this step] Shall Man, such step (1863–88).
142. His face, have] Has his face, do you think, (H proof ); Man’s face, have (1863–88); B. noted the latter reading on H proof and in the lists he sent to D. G. Rossetti and James T. Fields: see headnote, Text. On balance we think this is a revision rather than a correction, and have not emended 1855.
143–4. Than joy … Or grief ] Than a joy … Or a grief (H proof but not H proof 2).
145–52. The ‘early painters’ resolve to represent human life in all its complexity and inwardness, although this may mean distorting the outward form; such distortion has a positive value here, as a sign of spiritual life, in contrast to its negative value in Fra Lippo (see esp. ll. 179–220, pp. 495–7). Cp. CE & ED 649–92n. (III 73–5).
146. Cp. Ruskin, ‘Nature of Gothic’ (see l. 130n.): ‘The Greek could stay in his triglyph furrow, and be at peace; but the work of the Gothic heart is fretwork still, and it can neither rest in, nor from, its labour, but must pass on, sleeplessly, until its love of change shall be pacified for ever in the change that must come alike on them that wake and them that sleep’ (Works x 214). To cries] To the cry (H proof but not H proof 2).
147. “Become] “To become (H proof [but not H proof 2], 1863–88). 148. And paint] To paint (H proof but not H proof 2).
149. Make new hopes] emended from ‘Make the hopes’ in 1855. The original reading in H proof was ‘Make the new hopes’; B. changed it to ‘Make new hopes’ on H proof and noted this reading in the lists he sent to D. G. Rossetti and James T. Fields (see headnote, Text). All other eds. have ‘Make new hopes’, and we have emended accordingly, although there is a case for reverting to the original reading in H proof; see below, l. 259n.
149–50. flesh they fray … rags and tatters: alluding to the ascetic practices and lifestyles of the early church.
151. So bring] So we bring (H proof but not H proof 2); To bring (1863–88). 153.] Give these, I exhort you, their guerdon and glory (1863–88); B. noted this reading (with ‘I exhort’ for ‘I exhort you’) on H proof and in the lists he sent to D. G. Rossetti and James T. Fields: see headnote, Text. It is clearly a revision rather than a correction, and we have not emended 1855.
154. well did it: did it well.
155–6. On the source of this idea in Vasari’s Life of Stefano, see headnote, Sources. 156. quiddit: a rare form of ‘quiddity’, meaning quibble or nicety of argument. 157–60. Returning to the argument that the ‘worthies’ or unrecognized painters need acknowledgement in this world and not after graduation to the next life. 157. revolution: anticipating the political argument at the end of the poem; see headnote, Sources.
158. Which if on the earth we] Which if we on the earth (H proof ); Which if on earth you (1863–88). B. deleted ‘we’ in H proof but made no other change, leaving the line ungrammatical; in the lists he sent to D. G. Rossetti and James T. Fields he noted the reading ‘Which if on earth’ (keeping ‘we’ however). There is no clear case for emending 1855.
159. Honour them now—] Let us honour them now—(H proof ). Why, honour them now—(1863–65); Why, honour them now! (1868–88).
160. our degree] your degree (1863–88). when folks] when folk (1888).
161–76. Contrasting two different attitudes towards the purpose of life. The first (ll. 161–8) suggests that the struggles of this life are repeated in magnified form in the next; the second (ll. 169–76) that earthly life is a probation or test designed to teach certain lessons, and that once these lessons are learned no further ‘labour’ is required. There are parallels to both these attitudes elsewhere in B.’s work, occasionally (as here) in the same poem: cp. the image of the ‘engine’ in Sordello iii 811–28 (I 582), in which death transfers the ‘task’ of life ‘To be set up anew elsewhere, begin / A task indeed but with a clearer clime / Than the murk lodgment of our building-time’; and the late poem Rephan (Asolando, 1889), in which the speaker is impelled by existence in a ‘faultlessly exact’ and unchanging world to seek ‘[hopes], fears, loves, hates’ on earth.
165. congeries: a disordered mass or heap (pronounced to rhyme with ‘series’ below, although the orthodox pronunciation would place the emphasis on the first syllable).
172. its faith] our faith (1868–88).
173. Conflating the well-known saying ‘Spare the rod and spoil the child’ (Proverbs xiii 24; cp. Samuel Butler, Hudibras, II i 843) with St Paul’s injunction to ‘put away childish things’ on attaining manhood (1 Corinthians xiii 11). 175–6. According to the Dowager Countess of Jersey, B. told her that ‘he had embodied his feelings in the “Old Pictures in Florence” in the lines ending “I have had troubles enough for one” ’ (Fifty-One Years of Victorian Life [1922] 87). The remark is undated but probably comes from the 1870s. For another quotation from this book, see Evelyn Hope 16n. (p. 276).
175. Quoting Hebrews iv 9: ‘There remaineth therefore a rest to the people of God’.
179. My sculptor] And my sculptor (H proof but not H proof 2). Nicolo the Pisan: Nicola Pisano, born c. 1220, one of the most important figures in the history of sculpture; he is said by Vasari to have ‘liberated’ both sculpture and architecture ‘from the rude and tasteless old Greek manner’ (Foster i 60). His most famous work is the pulpit of the Baptistery of S. Giovanni at Pisa, which the Brownings would certainly have seen during their period of residence in the city. He is mentioned in Sordello i 575 (I 434), although there the relation between Greek and Gothic art is different; B. spells his first name as ‘Nicolo’ there too.
180. My painter] And my painter (H proof but not H proof 2); And painter (1863 only). Cimabue: Cenni di Pepi, called Cimabue (c. 1240–c. 1302), is the first artist to be commemorated in Vasari’s Lives. He was, according to Vasari, ‘the first cause of the restoration of the art of painting’ in Italy (Foster i 44), but, as Dante notes in Purgatorio (xi 94–6) his fame was eclipsed by his great successor Giotto: ‘Credette Cimabue nella pintura / tener lo campo, e ora ha Giotto il grido, / sì che la fama di colui è scura’ [It used to be thought that Cimabue held the field in painting, but now the cry is for Giotto, so that the fame of the former is obscured]. Cp. Pictor Ignotus 32n. (p. 229).
182. Ghiberti: Lorenzo di Bartolo (Ghiberti) (1378–1455), Florentine sculptor and painter, famous for his bronze doors for the Baptistery of Florence. Ghirlandajo: Domenico Bigordi (1449–94; see l. 201n.) was called ‘Ghirlandaio’ (‘garland maker’) because he came from a family which was famous for its skill in making ladies’ headdresses. For the story of B.’s discovery of the broken-up pieces of a Ghirlandaio altarpiece see headnote.
183. my critic-meed: the reward of my attention to his work.
184. heigh ho!: a conventional exclamation, here a sigh; in common with many Victorian poets B. found it in Elizabethan song and drama, e.g. Amiens’s song in As You Like It II vii.
185–92. For the scandal of the Catholic Church’s neglect of its art treasures, see headnote, Sources. David De Laura (SBC 9; see headnote, Sources) suggests an allusion to a passage in Anna Jameson’s Visits and Sketches at Home and Abroad (1837): ‘It has been said that fresco-painting is unfitted for our climate, damp and sea-coal fires being equally injurious; but the new method of warming all large buildings, either by steam or heated air, obviates, at least, this objection.’ Cp. also Coleridge’s comments in his 1818 lectures on Shakespeare: ‘And in truth, deeply, O! far more than words can express, as I venerate the Last Judgment and the Prophets of Michel Angelo Buonarotti,—yet the very pain which I repeatedly felt as I lost myself in gazing upon them, the painful consideration that their having been painted in fresco was the sole cause that they had not been abandoned to all the accidents of a dangerous transportation to a distant capital … forced upon my mind the reflection: how grateful the human race ought to be that the works of Euclid, Newton, Plato, Milton, Shakespere [sic], are not subjected to similar contingencies,—that they and their fellows, and the great, tho’ inferior, peerage of undying intellect, are secured’ (Lectures and Notes on Shakespere, ed. T. Ashe [1897], pp. 209–10).
185. now stand] would stand (H proof but not H proof 2); still stand (1868–88). 190. This statement is made by an imaginary opponent of the acquisition of Italian art by foreigners (like the speaker); the point is that frescoes by their nature are linked to the buildings in which they are painted.
194. the old delusions] the old delusion (1865–88).
198–9. dree / Such doom: ‘endure such a fate’ (Scottish dialect, here used with burlesque intent).
198. Why not reveal] Why won’t they reveal (H proof ).
199.] Such doom, that a captive might be out-ferreted? (1865); Such doom, how a captive might be out-ferreted? (1868–88); meaning that a work by one of the neglected early painters may be going cheap (either from a church or art dealer in Florence: see headnote, p. 404); the speaker humorously imagines that the artists themselves ought to inform him as to the whereabouts of such treasures.
200. Why do they] Why is it they (H proof, 1863–88).
201. Bigordi: according to Foster (i 200), the family name of Domenico called ‘Ghirlandaio’; see above l. 182n.
202. Sandro: Botticelli (1444/5–1510) was born Alessandro (‘Sandro’) di Mariano Filipepi. chivalric, bellicose: there is very little in Vasari’s brief Life of Botticelli to justify either of these epithets; he is instead described as ‘whimsical’, ‘eccentric’, and given to profligacy.
203. Nor wronged Lippino] Nor the wronged Lippino (1863–88). Filippino Lippi (c. 1457–1504), son of Fra Lippo Lippi and Lucrezia Buti (see headnote to Fra Lippo, p. 456). Orr suggests that he is ‘ “wronged” because others were credited with some of his best work’ (Handbook 210), including the frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel of the Carmine, where his father was a monk. Vasari argues that he had to work hard to remove ‘the stain’—presumably of illegitimacy— ‘left to him by his father’ (Foster ii 282).
204. Fra Angelico’s: Guido di Pietro, Fra Giovanni Angelico da Fiesole (1387–1455); see Fra Lippo 235–6n. (p. 498). He was exalted as an ‘inspired saint’ by Ruskin in Modern Painters ii (1846), a work B. knew and which may account for his modesty here (in which there may also be a hint of irony).
205. Taddeo Gaddi: Florentine painter (c. 1300–66); see l. 207n. Gaddi is blamed by Fantozzi for scaling down Giotto’s original plans for the Campanile (Fantozzi 321). 206. intonaco: the final coating of plaster spread upon a wall or other surface, esp. for fresco painting (OED); pronounced with accent on second syllable.
207. Jerome: the most severely ascetic and self-denying of the saints of the early church (c. 341–420), St Jerome was a popular subject for religious painting in the Renaissance, as Fra Lippo Lippi sardonically notes (ll. 73–4; p. 489); on the representation of Jerome in Renaissance art see Malcolm Andrews, Landscape and Western Art (Oxford 1999), ch. ii. In his Life of Gaddi, Vasari mentions a depiction of St Jerome ‘robed in the vestments of a cardinal’ by Gaddi in Santa Maria Novella. the heaven] the Heaven (1863–65), a rare example of capitalization being introduced in an edition after 1855.
208. No churlish] Not a churlish (H proof [but not H proof 2], 1863–88). Lorenzo Monaco: Lorenzo Monaco (‘Lawrence the Monk’) (c. 1370–c. 1422) was a member of the Camaldolese Order; see Fra Lippo 235–6n (p. 498).
209–10. Antonio Pollaiuolo (c. 1432–98) is depicted wearing a fez in Filippino Lippi’s fresco ‘St. Peter and St. Paul before the Proconsul’, which B. would have seen in the Brancacci Chapel, Florence; a reproduction is included in Le Monnier (Thomas 435). He is said to be ‘twice a craftsman’ either as a tribute to his technical skill, or (as Ohio suggests) in recognition of the fact that he learned two trades, having originally trained as a goldsmith.
211. give me the hap: give me the lucky find.
212. muscular Christ: the ‘Christ at the Column’, owned by the Brownings (see Collections Plate 16), currently at Harewood House. There is some disagreement amongst modern scholars about whether or not it is the work of Pollaiuolo. shows the draughtsman: illustrates the artist’s technical skill. Vasari notes that Pollaiuolo ‘treated his nude figures in a manner which approaches more nearly to that of the moderns than was usual with the artists who had preceded him’ and ‘dissected many human bodies to study the anatomy’; he was ‘the first who investigated the action of the muscles in this manner, that he might afterwards give them their due place and effect in his works’ (Foster ii 227).
213–16. Alesso Baldovinetti (1425–1499), a painter and mosaic-maker. His ‘finical touch’ is emphasized by Vasari: ‘Alesso was extremely careful and exact in his works, and of all the minutiæ which mother nature is capable of presenting, he took pains to be the close imitator’ (Foster ii 66). He also attempted to invent a new method of fresco painting with the aim of ‘[defending] his work from the effects of damp’; but it was a failure, with the result that ‘the work has in several places peeled off ’ (ibid.). Leonée Ormond identifies the ‘Virgin’ in question as the ‘Virgin and Child’ given to D. G. Rossetti by B.
214. tempera: distemper, a method of painting in which the colours are thickened with other substances before being applied to a dry surface (OED).
217–20. Margarito of Arezzo flourished c. 1262. Turner (p. 358) suggests that the details of the description that follows are taken from the portrait of Margheritone by Spinello Aretino, reproduced at the beginning of his Life in Le Monnier. Cp. EBB.’s Casa Guidi Windows i 379–90: ‘If old Margheritone trembled, swooned, / And died despairing at the open sill / Of other men’s achievements (who achieved, / By loving art beyond the master!) he / Was old Margheritone, and conceived / Never, at first youth and most ecstacy, / A Virgin like that dream of one, which heaved / The death-sigh from his heart. If wistfully / Margheritone sickened at the smell / Of Cimabue’s laurel, let him go!—/ For Cimabue stood up very well / In spite of Giotto’s—’.
218. barret: a small flat cap, It. biretta, often worn by Roman Catholic clerics (OED).
219. in a pet so: ‘in such a fit of petulance’.
220. saturnine: gloomy; pronounced here with the accent on the second syllable. poll-clawed parrot: the epithet refers to Margheritone’s bald head (‘poll’) which is seamed or scarred, but the phrase as a whole also recalls ‘poll-parrot’, often used as a comic insult: OED cites the humorist Douglas Jerrold (1851), a friend of B.’s: ‘You’ve no more manners than a poll-parrot’; cp. also Grandfather Smallweed addressing his wife in ch. xxxiii of Dickens’s Bleak House (1852–35): ‘Sit down, you dancing, prancing, shambling, scrambling poll-parrot!’ See also 2 Henry IV II iv 258–9, where the Prince mocks Falstaff: ‘Look, whether the withered elder hath not his poll clawed like a parrot’.
221. No poor] Not a poor (1863–88).
223. If such remain] If such still remain (H proof but not H proof 2).
224. The hoarding] The hoarding it (1863–88).
225. They: the painters, last seen taking their way through the streets (l. 195). 227. Rot or are left] Works rot or are left (H proof ); Their pictures are left (1863–88). B.’s note on H proof has ‘The pictures’; the lists he sent to D. G. Rossetti and James T. Fields both agree with this note (see headnote, Text). This reading is clearly a revision, not a correction, and we have not emended 1855.
228. The Jews are the dealers, the English the stealers (the English reputation for cultural pillage was well established by this date). the English!] the English, (1863–68, 1888); the English (1870, 1880). The lack of punctuation in 1870 and 1880 (which was probably set from a copy of 1870) may be a misprint but it makes sense taken with the next line.
229. Seeing]—Who see (H proof ); Who, seeing (1863–88).
230–2. The sense is that modern collectors are unmoved by the early painters whose work seems to them primitive (‘naked art’) but go into ecstasies over the sophisticated but lifeless productions of the modern school.
230. Who sell it] And sell it (H proof but not H proof 2); Will sell it (1863–88). calm as Zeno: Zeno of Citium in Cyprus (c. 333–262 bc) was the founder of the Stoic school of philosophy which preached equanimity in the face of the vicissitudes of life (hence his ‘calm’ demeanour).
231. At naked Art] At the naked Art (H proof ); At naked High Art (1863–88). ecstacies] ecstasies (1863–88 ); the 1855 spelling was allowable in the period.
232. clay-cold: cp. Ruskin, Modern Painters I (1846): ‘[Stansfield’s] picture of the Doge’s palace at Venice was quite clay-cold and untrue’ (Works iii 228). Carlino: Carlo Dolci (1616–86), a baroque Florentine artist. B.’s low opinion of him was shared by Ruskin: ‘Three penstrokes of Raffaele are a greater and a better picture than the most finished work that ever Carlo Dolci polished into inanity’ (Works iii 91). Cp. Shelley (Appendix A, p. 874), where B. has to account for Shelley’s admiration of Dolci.
233–40. The speaker laments that an unworthy collector has unearthed a lost masterpiece by Giotto. The story of this lost work is in Vasari: ‘A chapel and four pictures were painted by Giotto, for the fraternity of the Umiliati d’Ognissanti, in Florence … there was a small picture in distemper, in the transept of the church belonging to the Umiliati, which had been painted by Giotto with infinite care. The subject was the death of the Virgin, with the Apostles around her, and with the figure of Christ, who receives her soul into his arms. This work has been greatly prized by artists, and was above all valued by Michael Angelo Buonarroti, who declared, as we have said before, that nothing in painting could be nearer to the life than this was … [the painting] has since been carried away from the church.’ Mrs Foster adds in a footnote: ‘This picture reappeared at a later period, and after various vicissitudes became the property of Mr. N. Ottley, where I [Schorn] saw it in 1826’ (Foster i 113; see headnote, Composition). B. had forgotten some of these details by the time he explained the lines in a letter to Hiram Corson of 28 Dec. 1886: ‘[the] “little tablet” was a famous “Last Supper,” mentioned by Vasari, and gone astray long ago from the Church of S. Spirito: it turned up, according to report, in some obscure corner, while I was in Florence, and was at once acquired by a stranger. I saw it,—genuine or no, a work of great beauty’ (Corson, Introduction to the Study of Browning’s Poetry [Boston, 1891], facsimile between pp. ii and iii). See headnote, Composition, and cp. ll. 241–2.
235. Never!] Oh, never! (H proof, 1863–88).
236. tablet: a small wooden panel; most paintings were done on wood before the adoption of canvas in the fifteenth century.
237: Buonarroti: Michelangelo’s surname, used (and misspelled) by B. in Easter Day 799 (p. 133).
238. Buried] Was buried (1863–88).
239. Was left] And left (1863–88).
241. San Spirito: the church of Santo Spirito (the Holy Spirit), begun by Brunelleschi in the early fifteenth century and completed in 1481.
242. the Ognissanti: It. ‘All Saints’; begun in 1251, rebuilt in baroque style in 1627. 243.] Patient on altar-steps planting a weary toe! (1863–88, except 1868–88 which have ‘altar-step’).
244. detur amanti: ‘let it be given to the one who loves it’ (Latin).
245. Koh-i-noor: the arrival of the ‘Koh-i-noor’ (‘Mountain of Light’), reputed to be the world’s largest diamond, aboard the steam-ship Medea at Portsmouth was reported in The Times for Monday 1 July 1850; its history as a trophy of the rulers of India made it, for The Times, a ‘fitting symbol’ of British supremacy in India. It was displayed at the Great Exhibition of 1851.
246. Jewel of Giamschid: cp. Byron, The Giaour: ‘Her eye’s dark charm ’twere vain to tell … Soul beam’d forth in every spark / That darted from beneath the lid, / Bright as the Jewel of Giamschid’ (ll. 473, 477–9). Byron explains in a footnote that he is referring to ‘[the] celebrated fabulous ruby of Sultan Giamschid’. 247. So, in] And in (H proof ).
249–51. The sense is ‘when the Austrians are finally thrown out of Italy’: the ‘certain dotard’ is named in l. 255 as Count Radetzky, aged 89 in 1855, the commander of the Austrian forces which defeated the uprising of Piedmont-Sardinia at the battle of Novara in 1849. The ‘worse side’ of the St Gothard pass over the Alps would be the Swiss side, i.e. outside Italy.
250. Pitched] Is pitched (1863–88).
251. worse side] worser side (H proof but not H proof 2). Mont St. Gothard] Mont Saint Gothard (1863–88, except 1870 and 1880 which agree with 1855).
252. Have, to begin] We’ll, have to begin (H proof ); We shall begin (1863–88); the revs. clarify the sense of ‘Have’ in 1855 as ‘Let’s have’ or ‘We should have’. rejoicing,] rejoicing; (1863–88).
253–6. A satirical glance at the celebrations which followed the grant of a formal constitution by Leopold II of Tuscany in 1848; B. suggests that the volleys of shots fired into the air (‘blank cartridge’) are in fact an attempt to hunt the departing soul of Radetzky as if it were a partridge. In a letter of March 1849 EBB. refers to ‘the stupid habit of expressing joy & triumph here [in Florence] by firing into the air .. gunpowder without balls! so stupid!’ (EBB to Arabella i 229). Julia Markus notes a similar sentiment in the Tuscan Athenaeum of 18 Dec. 1847: ‘we almost dread to think what it may become, when the Civica actually fire with real Gunpowder!’ (Markus, BIS vi [1978] 50–1).
253. None of that] None of our (H proof ).
254. No civic guards] As when civic guards (H proof ); Nor a civic guard (1863–88). 255. Hunting] We hunted (H proof ).
256. Over Morello] Over Mount Morello (H proof ). Monte Morello overlooks Florence; cp. Andrea 93 (p. 302). squib and cracker: both forms of small firework. 257. We’ll shoot this time] This time we’ll shoot (1863–88). game: continuing the metaphor of patridge-shooting begun in l. 253.
258. No display] No stupid display (H proof ); No mere display (1863–88). the stone of Dante: the stone reputed to have been Dante’s favourite seat; see Wordsworth, Memorials of a Tour in Italy xix 1–5: ‘Under the shadow of a stately Pile / The dome of Florence, pensive and alone, / Nor giving heed to aught that passed the while, / I stood, and gazed upon a marble stone, / The laurelled Dante’s favourite seat’. The Florentines’ ‘display’ at the Stone of Dante in 1848 is described in Casa Guidi Windows i 601–60.
259. a sober kind of ] emended in agreement with H proof from ‘a kind of ’ in 1855; 1863–88 have ‘a kind of sober’. The latter reading is in the lists B. sent to D. G. Rossetti and James T. Fields (see headnote, Text), but in this instance, in contrast to l. 149, we prefer to restore the reading which B. evidently intended for 1855; unlike the earlier instance, the reading B. gives in the Rossetti and Fields lists is not supported by a note on H proof. Witan-agemot] Witanagemot (1868–88); the Anglo-Saxon parliament or council of wise men; like EBB. in Casa Guidi Windows, the speaker is implying that Italy needs to follow the English model in order to develop effective forms of popular representation. The use of a hyphen in the middle of the word is common in most of its variant spellings. 260. (“Casa Guidi,”] Ex: “Casa Guidi,” (1863–88). Casa Guidi was the name of the Brownings’ home in Florence. quod videas ante] in italic, 1863–88; B. requested this change in the list he sent to James T. Fields, but it does not appear in the list he sent to D. G. Rossetti (see headnote, Text); on balance we do not think there is a case for emending 1855. The Latin phrase means ‘for which, see above’; EBB.’s Casa Guidi Windows had been published in 1851.
261. To ponder Freedom] To ponder now Freedom’s (H proof ); Shall ponder, once Freedom (1863–88). B.’s note on H proof agrees with the 1855 reading, the only one which does so. The lists B. sent to D. G. Rossetti and James T. Fields (see headnote, Text) both have ‘to ponder, Freedom’. There is no case for emending 1855.
263. Go, hated] With the hated (H proof but not H proof 2). The ‘hated house’ is that of the Hapsburg François de Lorraine [sic], to whom the Grand Duchy of Tuscany had been given by the Treaty of Vienna in 1735 as compensation for the loss of his own duchy (Lorraine) to the dispossessed King of Poland. The Grand Duke of Tuscany at the time of the poem’s composition was Leopold II. 264. Orgagna hither.] Orgagna hither! (1863–88). Andrea di Cione (c. 1315–1368), a Florentine painter, sculptor, architect and poet was nicknamed ‘Orcagna’ or ‘Orgagna’. He lived during the heroic period of the Florentine Republic, and was, like Dante, involved in the construction of the Duomo or Cathedral at Florence. He is particularly associated with the Florentine Republic because he initiated the reconstruction of the Loggia dell’Orgagna (or Loggia de’Lanzi): ‘L’oggetto di questa fabbrica … fu di avere un luogo pubblico difeso dalle pioggie, per dare il possesso alla suprema magistratura della Repubblica fiorentina … finchè la patria di Dante, del Boccaccio, di Giotto, la maestra di gentile idioma e d’altissime idee, sarà visitata dagli stranieri, essi pure volgeranno lo sguardo a questo portico, nel quale il cittadino artista un cosi augusto seggio inalzava ai magistrati della sua Repubblica’ [The aim of this building … was to have a sheltered public place for the supreme magistrature of Florence to use … for as long as the homeland of Dante, Boccaccio and Giotto, the mistress of beautiful forms and sublime ideas, is visited by foreigners, they will turn their gaze on this grand entrance, in which the citizen-artist has erected such an august seat for the magistrates of his Republic] (Fantozzi 30–2). In Modern Painters (3rd ed., 1846) Ruskin places Orcagna alongside Giotto, Fra Angelico and Perugino as artists whose work will never be widely popular because of its rarefied intellectual and moral qualities (Works ii 82). Thomas (p. 437) notes that Mazzini delivered a speech calling on the Florentines to join Rome in its struggle for Italian freedom from Orcagna’s Loggia on 5 Mar. 1849. 265. prologuise] prologuize (1863–68, 1880); prologize (1888). Note the spelling of the title Artemis Prologuizes in its first edition (DL, 1842; see II 106); this was altered to ‘Prologizes’ in 1863, the same ed. in which ‘prologuize’ was introduced here. It means ‘to deliver a prologue’ (i.e. at the opposite end of the speech from the ‘peroration’ or closing passage).
266. Say fit things] Say proper things (H proof ); Utter fit things (1863–88).
267. Set truth] Set the true (H proof ); Feel truth (1863–88). the false at a] falsehood at (1865–88).
268. I.e. ‘Make clear what modern life requires’. Make] And make (H proof, 1863–65).
269–72. The view of history here, and the vocabulary, are influenced by Carlyle, although B. goes against Carlyle’s political bias towards the ‘hero’ or ‘great man’; the ‘fructuous’ (fruitful, truly civilized) eras are those of republican government in contrast to the ‘sterility’ of monarchical or absolute regimes.
269. Contrast] Contrasting (1863 only).
270–1. The earliest instance of the popular legend that the bear gives birth to unformed cubs, which it then licks into shape, is in Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia (ad 77) viii 54; B. plays on this by imagining that works of art produced under a monarchy are distorted from their natural shape into deformed monstrosities (or ‘chimæras’).
271. to the chimæra’s] into Chimæra’s (1865–88).
272. Pure Art’s birth being] While pure Art’s birth was (H proof but not H proof 2); While Pure Art’s birth is (1863–88). Cp. R. H. Stoddard’s account of a conversation which took place between Bayard Taylor and the Brownings in London in September 1851: ‘The Brownings expressed great satisfaction with their American reputation, and the conversation taking a turn that led to American Art Mrs. Browning expressed the belief that a Republican form of government was unfavourable to the Fine Arts. Mr. Taylor dissented to this opinion, and a general historical discussion ensued, which was carried on for some time with the greatest spirit, husband and wife taking directly opposite views’ (Life, Letters and Essays of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 2 vols. [New York 1877], vol. i, p. xxvi). 273–88. For the association of the Campanile with the cause of Italian liberation see headnote, and cp. Casa Guidi Windows i 68–72: ‘What word will men say,— here where Giotto planted / His campanile, like an unperplexed / Fine question Heavenward, touching the things granted / A noble people who, being greatly vexed / In act, in aspiration keep undaunted?’
273. (in a speech, curt Tuscan,] in a speech (curt Tuscan, (1863–88). Tuscan is the dialect from which modern Italian developed.
274.] Expurgate and sober, with scarcely an “issimo,”) (1863–88). B.’s note on H proof alters ‘an “issimo” ’ to ‘ “altissimo” ’, which makes less sense than what it replaces; B. probably meant to correct the misprint in l. 276, and this in turn suggests that he was copying these readings into H proof: see headnote, Text. The suffix ‘issimo’ is used to intensify adjectives in Italian.
275. Ending] To finish (H proof but not H proof 2); To end now (1863–88). half-told tale of Cambuscan: the Squire in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales tells the story of Cambuscan, the legendary King of Sarra in Tartary, but does not finish it; Milton refers to Chaucer as ‘him that left half told / The story of Cambuscan bold’ in Il Penseroso (ll. 109–10).
276. Turning the Bell-tower’s] Turn the Bell-tower’s (H proof but not H proof 2); And turn the Bell-tower’s (1863–68); And turn the bell-tower’s (1870–88). alt to altissimo] emended in agreement with 1863–88 from ‘altaltissimo’ in 1855; H proof has ‘alto to altissimo’. In the lists B. sent to Rossetti and James T. Fields the 1855 misprint is corrected to the present reading, and B. probably intended to correct it on H proof, but mistook the line: see l. 274n. and headnote, Text. The misprint in 1855 may have resulted from the compositor setting ‘alto to altissimo’ in error (repeating the ‘to’ would be an easy mistake to make); B. may then have corrected ‘alto’ to ‘alt’, whereupon the compositor compounded his first error by a second. The phrase ‘alt to altissimo’ means ‘high’ to ‘very high’.
277. beccaccia: woodcock (It.).
278–9. The Campanile … Soars] Shall the Campanile … Soar (H proof ); The Campanile … Shall soar (1863–88).
278. Duomo: lit. ‘dome’, the Italian term for cathedral.
279. its full fifty] full fifty (1863–88). braccia: an old Italian unit of length (used, e.g., by Vasari), named after the Italian for ‘arms’ (pl. ‘le braccia’); approximately the distance between the elbow and the wrist.
280. Florence became the first capital of the reunited Italy between 1865 and the final incorporation of the Papal States in 1871 (when Rome became the capital). 281.] So said, so done. That morning the scaffold (H proof ).
283. unbaffled: freed from an obstacle or difficulty; OED also cites Edward Bulwer Lytton, The Disowned (1829): ‘There seemed to dwell the first flow and life of youth, undimmed by a single fear and unbaffled in a single hope.’
284–5. the spire— / As, “God ] the spire— / When with “God (H proof ); the spire / While, “God (1863–88, except 1870 and 1888 which have no comma after ‘While’).
285. “God and the People”: a translation of Giuseppe Mazzini’s slogan ‘Dio e popolo’; see headnote, p. 408, and cp. EBB.’s remark in a letter of 28 Apr. 1852: ‘Mazzini writes “God & the people” on a banner, & thinks this enough both for theology & politics’ (EBB to Arabella i 487).
286. tricolor: the emblem of Republicanism, modelled on the French tricolor; the speaker is clearly imagining the united Italy of the future as a republic rather than a monarchy (cp. ll. 270–1n.).
287.] Why, to hail him, the vindicated Giotto (H proof ); At least to foresee that glory of Giotto (1863–88). The phrase ‘At least’ implies that the speaker’s prophecy of a united and ‘completed’ Italy is meant to be some kind of recompense for his failure to acquire the art treasures described earlier in the poem. 288. And Florence together] Thanking God for it all, (H proof ).