insinuate some naive foible in their personification, a numbness of
the heart or an archaism of soul, which reveals the possessed one as
but a human brother, after all, shaped by his environment, and
embodying the spirit of an historic epoch out of which the current
of modern life is still streaming.

The group of art poems which follows similarly presents a dramatic
synthesis of the art of the Renaissance as represented by three
types of painters. The religious devotion of the monastic painter,
whose ecstatic spirit breathes in "Pictor Ignotus," probably gives
this poem its place adjoining Agricola and Lazarus. His artist's
hankering to create that beauty to bless the world with which his
soul refrains from grossly satisfying, unites the poem with the two
following ones. In the first of these the realistic artist, Fra
Lippo, is graphically pictured personally ushering in the high noon
of the Italian efflorescence. In the second, the gray of that day of
art is silvering the self-painted portrait of the prematurely
frigid and facile formalist, Andrea del Sarto. In "Pictor Ignotus"
not only the personality of the often unknown and unnamed
painting-brother of the monasteries is made clear, but also the
nature of his beautiful cold art and the enslavement of both art and
personality to ecclesiastical beliefs and ideals. In "Fra Lippo
Lippi" not alone the figure of the frolicsome monk appears caught in
his pleasure-loving escapade, amid that picturesque knot of
alert-witted Florentine guards, ready to appreciate all the good
points in his story of his life and the protection the arms of the
Church and the favor of the Medici have afforded his genius, but,
furthermore, is illustrated the irresistible tendency of the
art-impulse to expand beyond the bounds set for it either by laws of
Church or art itself, and to find beauty wheresoever in life it