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
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.
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