370 Then steps a sweet angelic slip of a thing Forward, puts out a soft palm?'Not so fast!' ?Addresses the celestial presence, 'nay? He made you and devised you, after all, Though he's none of you! Could Saint John there draw?
375 His camel-hair5 make up a painting-brush? We come to brother Lippo for all that,
Iste perfecit opus!'6 So, all smile?
I shuffle sideways with my blushing face
1. A convent church in Florence. 2. Sample of my work. The completed painting, which Browning saw in Florence, is Lippi's Coronation of the Virgin (1441). 3. A powder (like talcum) made from sweet- smelling roots of a flower. 4. The prosperous man who endured immense suffering without once questioning God's will (see the book of Job).
5. Cf. Mark 1.6: 'And John was clothed with camel's hair.' 6. This man made the work! (Latin). In this painting, as later completed, these words appear beside a figure that Browning took to be Lippi's self- portrait.
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128 0 / ROBERT BROWNING
Under the cover of a hundred wings
380 Thrown like a spread of kirtles0 when you're gay skirts And play hot cockles,7 all the doors being shut, Till, wholly unexpected, in there pops The hothead husband! Thus I scuttle off To some safe bench behind, not letting go
385 The palm of her, the little lily thing That spoke the good word for me in the nick, Like the Prior's niece . . . Saint Lucy, I would say. And so all's saved for me, and for the church A pretty picture gained. Go, six months hence!
390 Your hand, sir, and good-by: no lights, no lights! The street's hushed, and I know my own way back, Don't fear me! There's the gray beginning. Zooks!
ca. 1853 1855
Andrea del Sarto1
(called 'The Faultless Painter')
But do not let us quarrel any more, No, my Lucrezia; bear with me for once: Sit down and all shall happen as you wish. You turn your face, but does it bring your heart? I'll work then for your friend's friend, never fear, Treat his own subject after his own way, Fix his own time, accept too his own price, And shut the money into this small hand When next it takes mine. Will it? tenderly? Oh, I'll content him?but tomorrow, Love! I often am much wearier than you think, This evening more than usual, and it seems As if?forgive now?should you let me sit Here by the window with your hand in mine And look a half-hour forth on Fiesole,2
Both of one mind, as married people use,? usually are Quietly, quietly the evening through, I might get up tomorrow to my work Cheerful and fresh as ever. Let us try. Tomorrow, how you shall be glad for this! Your soft hand is a woman of itself,
7. A game in which a player wears a blindfold. to the more exalted character, should ever appear I. This portrait of Andrea del Sarto (1486-1531) in him.' was derived from a biography written by his pupil Browning also follows Vasari's account of Giorgio Vasari, author of The Lives of the Painters Andrea's marriage to a beautiful widow, Lucrezia, (1550). Vasari's account seeks to explain why his 'an artful woman w ho made him do as she pleased Florentine master, one of the most skillful painters in all things.' Vasari reports that Andrea's 'immodof the Renaissance, never altogether fulfilled the erate love for her soon caused him to neglect the promise he had shown early in his career and why studies demanded hv his art' and that this infatuhe had never arrived (in Vasari's opinion) at the ation had 'more influence over him than the glory level of such artists as Raphael. Vasari noted that and honor towards which he had begun to make Andrea suffered from 'a certain timidity of mind such hopeful advances.' . . . which rendered it impossible that those evi-2. A suburb on the hills overlooking Florence. dences of ardor and animation, which are proper
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ANDREA DEL SARTO / 1281
And mine the man's bared breast she curls inside. Don't count the time lost, neither; you must serve For each of the five pictures we require:
25 It saves0 a model. So! keep looking so ? saves the expense of My serpentining beauty, rounds on rounds!3 ?How could you ever prick those perfect ears, Even to put the pearl there! oh, so sweet? My face, my moon, my everybody's moon,
30 Which everybody looks on and calls his, And, I suppose, is looked on by in turn, While she looks?no one's: very dear, no less.4 You smile? why, there's my picture ready made, There's what we painters call our harmony!
35 A common grayness silvers everything5? All in a twilight, you and I alike ?You, at the point of your first pride in me (That's gone you know)?but I, at every point; My youth, my hope, my art, being all toned down
40 To yonder sober pleasant Fiesole. There's the bell clinking from the chapel top; That length of convent wall across the way Holds the trees safer, huddled more inside; The last monk leaves the garden; days decrease, 45 And autumn grows, autumn in everything. Eh? the whole seems to fall into a shape As if I saw alike my work and self And all that I was born to be and do, A twilight-piece. Love, we are in God's hand. 50 How strange now, looks the life he makes us lead; So free we seem, so fettered fast we are! I feel he laid the fetter: let it lie! This chamber for example?turn your head? All that's behind us! You don't understand 55 Nor care to understand about my art, But you can hear at least when people speak: And that cartoon,0 the second from the door drawing ?It is the thing, Love! so such things should be ? Behold Madonna!?I am bold to say. 60 I can do with my pencil what I know, What I see, what at bottom of my heart I wish for, if I ever wish so deep? Do easily, too?when I say, perfectly, 1 do not boast, perhaps: yourself are judge, 65 Who listened to the Legate's6 talk last week, And just as much they used to say in France. At any rate 'tis easy, all of it! No sketches first, no studies, that's long past: I do what many dream of, all their lives, 70 ?Dream? strive to do, and agonize to do,
3. Coils of hair like the coils of a serpent. 5. The predominant color in many of Andrea's 4. Her affections are centered on no one person, paintings is silver gray, not even on her husband, yet she is nevertheless 6. A deputy of the pope, dear to him.
