Browning, Renaissance Painting, and the Problem of Raphael

Abstract

You and I would rather read that volume, (Taken to his beating bosom by it) Lean and list bosom-beats of Rafael, Would we not? than wonder at Madonnas-- Her, San Sisto names, and Her, Foligno, Her, that visits Florence in a vision, Her, that's left with lilies in Louvre-- Seen by us and all world in circle. (1) One Word More laments loss of hundred love sonnets that Raphael had written to his mistress, Margherita, and cherishes shared knowledge of this historical detail--this small secret from Filippo Baldinucci--as quality that distinguishes Elizabeth's and Robert's veneration of painter from that of encircling world. The awareness of loss rather than loss itself is what matters most, since if sonnets had survived, then, no doubt, world would have closed in on them too, and because regret defers question of whether Raphael's poetry could really be more interesting than his painting. But importance of losses and discoveries, of knowledge of such things to cognoscenti, and of sharing of arcana with a readership, typified Robert Browning's response to Italian Renaissance art. Because he valued sense of discovering behind work, often in striking or improbable biographical details, and then tended to posit such life as origin and key to painting, his enthusiasm has sometimes been dismissed as inexpert or unsophisticated. (2) Relying on Vasari's Lives and Baldinucci's Notizie has obvious limitations, but centrality of biography tailored with Browning's perception of a new emphasis upon man as subject in paintings themselves. Browning's fascination for so-called primitives (Where you style them, you of little wit, / Old Master This and Early Other [Old Pictures in Florence, 8:60-61]), whom he began to collect, after a fashion, in Italy, is still essentially a poet's interest in what One Word More calls an alien to artist's(8.69). If his particular interest in and championing of Italian art of fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, the season/Of Art's spring-birth so dim and dewy, (Old Pictures in Florence, XXLII.177-178) therefore attests to what Walter Pater would describe as partial alienation from its own limitations whereby one art form would be observed to pass into condition of some other Browning's poems about painting may have something in common with other or revivalist modes of thinking, and most obviously with early Pre-Raphaelitism. (3) The primitivist revival had its roots in German Romanticism in last part of eighteenth century, but its purest expression came perhaps in early years of nineteenth century from Nazarene community in monastery of San Isidoro, in Rome. Valuing what they perceived to be closer spiritual connection to an ascetic Christianity in early Italian painters, Nazarene group emphasized devotional employment of images and celebrated simplicity and clarity of iconographical traditions--all of which implied a sympathetic relationship to Catholicism. Purity, of course, is always in one way or another issue, and in first years of Pre- Raphaelite movement, at least as it was later to be memorialized by William Holman Hunt, a similar reverence for what Hunt described as naive traits of frank expression and unaffected grace in early Italian art, had inspired Brotherhood to pick its quarrel with Victorian art establishment. (4) Browning, like many others, was influenced by Alexis Francois Rio's impassioned revaluation of Catholic art in De la poesie chretienne, first published in 1835 and later added to as De l'art chretien (1861-67), as well as by art history of his friend Anna Jameson, who transmitted Rio's ideas to an English audience and made them more palatable to Protestant sensibility, and he was also familiar with Francis Palgrave's Murray's Handbook for Travellers in Northern Italy (1842), which, again, set about re-evaluating early Italian painting. …