Such poems
as these put before the cool gaze of the present century the very
men of the elder day of religion. Their robes shine with an
unearthly light, and their abstracted eyes are hypnotized by the
effulgence of their own haloes. Yet the poet never fails to
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.
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