Browning's Painters

Abstract

This essay examines all Browning's poems about paintings in order to explore his (not always consistent) view of art history, particularly of the importance of Greek sculpture and mythology in later centuries, and of how medieval painting changed into that of the Renaissance. Discussion of Pictor Ignotus and (especially) of Andrea de Sarto has often been influenced by psychoanalytic thinking, but the problems in applying psychoanalysis to poems have not always been recognized. Finally, a discussion of One Word More enables us to explore Browning's (or his wife's) uneasiness with the dramatic monologue. Gerard de Lairesse was a seventeenth-century Dutch painter who went blind and then wrote a large book, The Art of Painting in all its Branches, translated from Dutch into English in 1778. Browning, like posterity, was unimpressed by his paintings, but claimed that as a child he had read Gerard's Art of Painting more often than any other book. Gerard was a fanatical disciple of Greek classicism, painted nothing but mythological scenes, and dismissed those Dutch painters we now admire, considering them incapable of nobility because of the ordinariness of their subjects. In the poem in which he parleys with Gerard, Browning imagines himself taking one of the imaginary 'Walks' which Gerard took through the Dutch landscape, turning Holland into Dreamland. He imagines himself seeing the mythological episodes that Gerard favoured and tried to paint: Jove's eagle pouncing on its prey, a vision of Artemis, a satyr at noon consumed with longing for a nymph, and Alexander in battle with Darius. The noon landscape in which the satyr's longing is described is a set piece of verbal scene-painting that does not often occur in Browning: Noon is the conqueror,--not a spray, nor leaf, Nor herb, nor blossom but has rendered up Its morning dew; the valley seemed one cup Of cloud-smoke, but the vapour's reign was brief, Sun-smitten, see, it hangs, the filmy haze-- Grey-garmenting the herbless mountain-side, To soothe the day's sharp glare: while far and wide Above unclouded burns the sky, one blaze With fierce immitigable blue, no bird Ventures to spot by passage [...]. (With Gerard de Lairesse, ll. 262-71) (1) The poet not only accompanies Gerard on his walk, he sees with Gerard's eyes, turning the dull Dutch landscape into vivid classical myths. It is a surprise, then, to read on and find that the poem is an attack on Gerard's mythologizing habit: Let things be-not seem, I counsel rather,-do, and nowise dream! Earth's young significance is all to learn: The dead Greek lore lies buried in the urn Where who seeks fire finds ashes. (ll. 389-93) The moral of the poem is that instead of revelling in mythology we should live firmly and realistically in the present; past modes of seeing are left behind as humanity progresses: 'Nothing has been which shall not bettered be Here | after' (ll. 371-72). And so the poem ends with a brief un mythological nature poem : 'rhyme | Such as one makes now' (ll. 421-22). To begin a discussion of Browning's painters with Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in their Day is no doubt eccentric but has certain advantages. The Parleyings appeared in 1887, only two years before Browning's death, and like many of the other late poems is now read by no one except a few specialists. The syntax, as is usual in late Browning, is tortured to the point of bewilderment, leading us to wonder if he should be regarded as a proto-modernist--though comparison with, say, Pound or Hart Crane soon returns him to the Victorian age where he belongs. And the opinions are often as eccentric as the syntax. Two of these poems deal with painters, the other being a Parleying with the equally forgotten Francis Furini, who painted nudes until he gave up art to become a very conscientious parish priest. …