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

Abstract

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