“I spent some most delightful time,” Rossetti wrote to Allingham shortly after the publication of Men and Women, “with Browning at Paris, both in the evenings and at the Louvre, where (and throughout conversation) I found his knowledge of early Italian art beyond that of any one I ever met—­encyclopedically beyond that of Ruskin himself.”  The poem Old Pictures at Florence, which Rossetti calls “a jolly thing,” and which is that and much more, is full of Browning’s learned enthusiasm for the early Italian painters, and it gives a reason for the strong attraction which their adventures after new beauty and passion had for him as compared with the faultless achievements of classical sculpture.  Greek art, according to Browning, by presenting unattainable ideals of material and mundane perfection, taught men to submit.  Early Christian art, even by faultily presenting spiritual ideals, not to be attained on earth but to be pursued through an immortal life, taught men to aspire.  The aim of these painters was not to exhibit strength or grace, joy or grief, rage or love in their complete earthly attainment, but rather to

    Make new hopes shine through the flesh they fray,
     New fears aggrandize the rags and tatters: 
    To bring the invisible full into play! 
     Let the visible go to the dogs—­what matters?

[Illustration:  ANDREA DEL SARTO.

From a print after the portrait by himself in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence.]

The prophecy with which the poem concludes, of a great revival of Italian art consequent on the advent of political and intellectual liberty, has not obtained fulfilment in the course of the half century that has elapsed since it was uttered.  Browning’s doctrine that aspiration towards what is higher is more to be valued in art than the attainment of what is lower is a leading motive in the admirable dramatic monologue placed in the lips of Andrea del Sarto, the faultless painter.  His craftsmanship is unerring; whatever he imagines he can achieve; nothing in line or in colour is other than it ought to be; and yet precisely because he has succeeded, his failure is profound and irretrievable: 

    Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,
    Or what’s a heaven for?  All is silver-grey
    Placid and perfect with my art:  the worse!

He could set right the arm which is wrongly put in Rafael’s work that fronts him; but “all the play, the insight and the stretch” of Rafael are lacking in his own faultless lines.  He looks back regretfully to his kingly days at Fontainebleau with the royal Francis, when what seemed a veritable fire was in his heart.  And he tries to find an excuse for his failure as artist and as man in the coldness of his beautiful Lucrezia—­for he who has failed in the higher art has also failed in the higher love—­Lucrezia, who values his work only by the coins it brings in, and who needs those coins just now for one whose whistle invites her away.  All might be so much better otherwise!  Yet otherwise he cannot choose that it should be; his art must remain what it is—­not golden but silver-grey; and his Lucrezia may attend to the Cousin’s whistle if only she retains the charm, not to be evaded, of her beauty.[67]