chooses to turn the light of its gaze. So, also, in "Andrea del
Sarto," the easy cleverness of the unaspiring craftsman is not
embodied apart from the abject relationship which made his very soul
a bond-slave to the gross mandates of "the Cousin's whistle." Yet
in all three poems the biographic and historic conditions
contributing toward the individualizing of each artist are so
unobtrusively epitomized and vitally blended, that, while scarcely
any item of specific study of the art and artists of the Renaissance
would be out of place in illustrating the essential truth of the
portraiture and assisting in the better appreciation of the poem,
there is no detail of the workmanship which does not fall into the
background as a mere accessory to the dominant figure through whose
relationship to his art his station in the past is made clear.

This sort of dramatic synthesis of a salient, historical epoch is
again strikingly disclosed in the following poem of the Renaissance
period, "The Bishop Orders his Tomb at Saint Praxed's Church." In
this, again, the art-connoisseurship of the prelacy, so important
an element in the Italian movement towards art-expression, is
revealed to the life in the beauty-loving personality of the dying
bishop. And by means, also, of his social ties with his nephews,
called closer than they wish about him now; with her whom "men would
have to be their mother once"; with old Gandolf, whom he fancies
leering at him from his onion-stone tomb; and with all those strong
desires of the time for the delight of being envied, for marble
baths and horses and brown Greek manuscripts and mistresses, the
seeds of human decay planted in the plot of Time, known as the
Central Renaissance, by the same lingering fleshliness and
self-destroying self-indulgence as was at home in pagan days, are
livingly exposed to the historic sense.