The very movement of the lines, their tone and touch, contribute to the effect.  A single clear impression is made to result from an infinity of minute, scarcely appreciable touches:  how fine these touches are, how clear the impression, can only be hinted at in words, can be realised only by a loving and scrupulous study.

Whether the picture which suggested the poem is an authentic work of Andrea, or whether, as experts have now agreed, it is a work by an unknown artist representing an imaginary man and woman is, of course, of no possible consequence in connection with the poem.  Nor is it of any more importance that the Andrea of Vasari is in all probability not the real Andrea.  Historic fact has nothing to do with poetry:  it is mere material, the quarry of ideas; and the real truth of Browning’s portrait of Andrea would no more be impugned by the establishment of Vasari’s inaccuracy, than the real truth of Shakespeare’s portrait of Macbeth by the proof of the untrustworthiness of Holinshed.

A greater contrast, in every respect, than that between Andrea del Sarto and Fra Lippo Lippi can scarcely be conceived.  The story of Filippo Lippi[29] is taken, like that of Andrea, from Vasari’s Lives:  it is taken as literally, it is made as authentically living, and, in its own more difficult way, it is no less genuine a poem.  The jolly, jovial tone of the poem, its hearty humour and high spirits, and the breathless rush and hurry of the verse, render the scapegrace painter to the life.  Not less in keeping is the situation in which the unsaintly friar is introduced:  caught by the civic guard, past midnight, in an equivocal neighbourhood, quite able and ready, however, to fraternise with his captors, and pour forth, rough and ready, his ideas and adventures.  A passage from the poem placed side by side with an extract from Vasari will show how faithfully the record of Fra Lippo’s life is followed, and it will also show, in some small measure, the essential newness, the vividness and revelation of the poet’s version.

“By the death of his father,” writes Vasari,[30] “he was left a friendless orphan at the age of two years, his mother also having died shortly after his birth.  The child was for some time under the care of a certain Mona Lapaccia, his aunt, the sister of his father, who brought him up with great difficulty until he had attained his eighth year, when, being no longer able to support the burden of his maintenance, she placed him in the above-named convent of the Carmelites.”

Here is Browning’s version:—­

      “I was a baby when my mother died
      And father died and left me in the street. 
      I starved there, God knows how, a year or two
      On fig-skins, melon-parings, rinds and shucks,
      Refuse and rubbish.  One fine frosty day,
      My stomach being empty as your hat,
      The wind doubled me up and down I went.