But men may be "faultily faultless"; and what he lacked was just the one thing needful—the consecration and the poet's dream, which lift many works by less skilful hands than his into the higher region of imaginative art—
Their works drop groundward, but themselves, I know,
Reach many a time a heaven that's shut to me,...
My works are nearer heaven, but I sit here.
And the self-reproach was not less bitter for the knowledge of "what might have been." There is a story that Michael Angelo visited his studio, and said afterwards to Raphael—
"Friend, there's a certain little sorry scrub
"Goes up and down our Florence, none cares how,
"Who, were he set to plan and execute
"As you are, pricked on by your popes and kings,
"Would bring the sweat into that brow of yours!"
Yet Andrea himself too was once pricked on by kings. Two pictures of his had been sent to Francis I., who thereupon invited the painter to his court. And there for a time he worked and was honoured; but in the midst of it all he sat reading the letters which Lucrezia, his wife, sent him to Paris. "You called me and I came home to your heart." It is her face which we see everywhere in Andrea's Madonnas, and if at any time he took his model from any other face, there was always a resemblance to hers in the painting—
You smile? why, there's my picture ready made!
But Lucrezia served as his model, not his ideal. She had been married before to a hatter, but was remarkable, says Vasari, who worked in Andrea's studio and had a grudge against her, "as much for pride and haughtiness, as for beauty and fascination."[167] And
Had the mouth there urged
"God and the glory! never care for gain....
"Live for fame, side by side with Agnolo!
"Rafael is waiting: up to God, all three!"
I might have done it for you. So it seems.
It is in some such mood of communing with himself that we seem here to see the painter; yet there is a certain undercurrent of contentment below the look of melancholy. "The force of a beautiful face carries me to heaven": so sang Michael Angelo. Lucrezia dragged her husband down; his rivals overcame him—
Because there's still Lucrezia,—as I choose.