He maintained that if we get beauty we get the best thing God invents. But he rubs out his picture and paints what they like, clenching his teeth with rage the while; but sometimes, when a warm evening finds him painting saints, the revolt is complete, and he plays the fooleries they have caught him at. He knows he is a beast, but he can appreciate the beauty, the wonder and the power in the shapes of things which God has made to make us thankful for them. They are not to be passed over and despised, but dwelt upon and wondered at, and painted too, for we must count it crime to let a truth slip. We are so made that we love things first when we see them painted, though we have passed them over unnoticed a hundred times before—

“And so they are better, painted—better to us.
Art was given for that.”

“The world is no blot for us, nor blank; it means intensely, and means good.” “Ah, but,” says the Prior, “your work does not make people pray!” “But a skull and cross-bones are sufficient for that; you don’t need art at all.”... And then the poor monk begs the guard not to report him: he will make amends for the offence done to the Church; give him six months’ time, he will paint such a picture for a convent! It will please the nuns. “So six months hence. Good-bye! No lights: I know my way back!”

Notes.—“The Carmine’s my cloister,” the monastery of the friars Del Carmine, where Fra Lippo was brought up. “Cosimo of the Medici” (1389-1464), the great Florentine statesman, who was called the “Father of his country.” Saint Laurence == San Lorenzo at Florence, the church which contains the Medici tombs and several of Michael Angelo’s pictures. “Droppings of the wax to sell again”: in Catholic countries, where many wax torches are used, the wax drippings are carefully gathered by the poor boys to sell; in Spain they pick up even the ends of the wax vestas used by smokers at the bull fights for the same purpose. The Eight, the magistrates who governed Florence. Antiphonary, the Roman Service-Book, containing all that is sung in the choir—the antiphons, responses, etc.; it was compiled by Gregory the Great. Carmelites, monks of the Order of Mount Carmel in Syria; established in the twelfth century. Camaldolese, an order of monks founded by St. Romualdo in 1027; the name is derived from the family who owned the land on which the first monastery was built—the Campo Maldoli. “Preaching Friars”: the Dominicans, established by St. Dominic; the name of the “Brothers Preachers” or “Friars Preachers” was given them by Pope Innocent III. in 1215. Giotto, a great architect and painter (1266-1337); he was a friend of Dante. Brother Angelico == Fra Angelico; his real name was Giovanni da Fiesole; he was the famous religious painter, painting the soul and disregarding the flesh; he was said to paint some of his devotional pictures on his knees. Brother Lorenzo, Don Lorenzo. Monaco == the monk; he was a great painter, of the Order of the Camaldolese. Guidi == Tommaso Guidi or Masaccio, nicknamed Hulking Tom, was a painter, born 1401; he “laboured,” says the chronicler, in “nakeds.” “A St. Laurence at Prato,” near Florence, where are frescoes by Lippi: St. Laurence suffered martyrdom by being burned upon a gridiron; he bore it with such fortitude, says the legend, that he cried to his tormentors to turn him over, as he “was done on one side.” Chianti wine, a famous wine of Tuscany. Sant’ Ambrogio’s == Saint Ambrose’s at Florence. “I shall paint God in the midst, Madonna and her babe”: the beautiful picture of the Coronation of the Virgin in the Accademia delle Belle Arti at Florence is the one referred to in these lines. The Browning Society in 1882 published a very fine photograph of this great work, by Alinari Brothers of Florence. The flower songs in the poem are of the variety known as the stornelli; the peasants of Tuscany sing these songs at their work, “and as one ends a song another caps it with a fresh one, and so they go on vying with each other. These stornelli consist of three lines. The first usually contains the name of a flower, which sets the rhyme, and is five syllables long. Then the love theme is told in two lines of eleven syllables each, agreeing by rhyme, assonance, or repetition with the first.” [See Poet Lore, vol ii., p. 262. Miss R. H. Busk’s “Folk Songs of Italy,” and Miss Strettel’s “Spanish and Italian Folk Songs.”]

Francesco Romanelli (Beatrice Signorini), the artist who paints Artemisia’s portrait, which his wife destroys in a fit of jealousy.

Francis Furini, Parleyings with. (Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in their Day: 1887.) [The Man.] “Francis Furini was born in 1600 at Florence, and has been styled the ‘Albani’ and the ‘Guido’ of the Florentine school. At the age of forty he took orders, and until his death in 1649 remained an exemplary parish priest. In his earlier days he was especially famous for his painting of the nude figure; his drawing is remarkably graceful, but the colour is defective. One of his French biographers complains that he paints the nude too well to be quite proper, and points to the ‘Adam and Eve,’ in the Pitti Palace as a proof of this statement. Perhaps the painter thought so too, for there is a tradition that on his death-bed he desired all his undraped pictures to be collected and destroyed. His wishes were not carried out, and few private galleries at Florence are without pictures by him.” (Pall Mall Gazette, January 18th, 1887.)

[The Poem.] In the opening lines we are introduced to the good pastor, the painter-priest who lived two hundred and fifty years ago at Florence, and fed his flock with spiritual food while he helped their bodily necessities. The picture is a pleasant one, but the poet deals not with the pastor but the artist; and this painter of the nude has been selected by Browning as a text on which to express the sentiments of artists on the subject of,—

“The dear
Fleshly perfection of the human shape,”

as a gospel for mankind. When Mr. Browning writes on art we have, as Mr. Symons expresses it, “painting refined into song.” The lines in the seventh canto beginning—

“Bounteous God,
Deviser and dispenser of all gifts
To soul through sense,—in art the soul uplifts
Man’s best of thanks!”