That tragedy was pitiful.  Andrea del Sarto was a faultless painter and a weak character; and it fell to his lot to love with passion a faithless woman.  His natural weakness was doubled by the weakness engendered by unconquerable passion; and he ruined his life, his art, and his honour, to please his wife.  He wearied her, as women are wearied, by passion unaccompanied by power; and she endured him only while he could give her money and pleasures.  She despised him for that endurance, and all the more that he knew she was guilty, but said nothing lest she should leave him.  Browning fills his main subject—­his theory of the true aim of art—­with this tragedy; and his treatment of it is a fine example of his passionate humanity; and the passion of it is knitted up with close reasoning and illuminated by his intellectual play.

It is worth a reader’s while to read, along with this poem, Alfred de Musset’s short play, Andre del Sarto.  The tragedy of the situation is deepened by the French poet, and the end is told.  Unlike Browning, only a few lines sketch the time, its temper, and its art.  It is the depth of the tragedy which De Musset paints, and that alone; and in order to deepen it, Andrea is made a much nobler character than he is in Browning’s poem.  The betrayal is also made more complete, more overwhelming.  Lucretia is false to Andrea with his favourite pupil, with Cordiani, to whom he had given all he had, whom he loved almost as much as he loved his wife.  Terrible, inevitable Fate broods over this brief and masterly little play.

The next of these imaginative representations of the Renaissance is, The Bishop orders his Tomb at St. Praxed’s Church.  We are placed in the full decadence of the Renaissance.  Its total loss of religion, even in the Church; its immorality—­the bishop’s death-bed is surrounded by his natural sons and the wealth he leaves has been purchased by every kind of iniquity—­its pride of life; its luxury; its semi-Paganism; its imitative classicism; its inconsistency; its love of jewels, and fine stones, and rich marbles; its jealousy and envy; its pleasure in the adornment of death; its delight in the outsides of things, in mere workmanship; its loss of originality; its love of scholarship for scholarship’s sake alone; its contempt of the common people; its exhaustion—­are one and all revealed or suggested in this astonishing poem.

These are the three greater poems dedicated to this period; but there are some minor poems which represent different phases of its life.  One of these is the Pictor Ignotus.  There must have been many men, during the vital time of the Renaissance, who, born, as it were, into the art-ability of the period, reached without trouble a certain level in painting, but who had no genius, who could not create; or who, if they had some touch of genius, had no boldness to strike it into fresh forms of beauty; shy, retiring men, to whom the criticism of the world was a pain