"And so for a pretty woman's sake, was a great nature degraded.
And out of sympathy with its impulses, broad, and deep,
and tender as only the greatest can show, `Andrea del Sarto',
our great, sad poem, was written."

The monologue exhibits great perfection of finish. Its composition
was occasioned, as Mr. Furnivall learned from the poet himself
(see `Browning Society's Papers', Part II., p. 161),
by the portrait of Andrea del Sarto and his wife, painted by himself,
and now in the Pitti Palace, in Florence. Mr. Browning's friend,
and his wife's friend, Mr. John Kenyon (the same to whom Mrs. Browning
dedicated `Aurora Leigh'), had asked the poet to buy him a copy
of Andrea del Sarto's picture. None could be got, and so Mr. Browning
put into a poem what the picture had said to himself, and sent it
to Mr. Kenyon. It was certainly a worthy substitute.




Fra Lippo Lippi.



The Italian artist, Lippi, is the speaker. Lippi was one
of the representatives of the protest made in the fifteenth century
against the conventional spiritualization in the art of his time.
In the monologue he gives expression to his faith in the real,
in the absolute spiritual significance of the lineaments
of the human face, and in the forms of nature. The circumstances