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In ‘Old Pictures in Florence’ (probably composed from 1850 to 1853)/ EBB’s influence is manifest through the resemblances to the concrete textual model of her

Casa Guidi Windows (published in two parts in 1848 and 1851), whose authority is

cited in hne 260. This long political poem expresses her support for the Risorgimento,

the Italian movement for national unification. Intertextual references include verbal echoes, the aesthetic and political message, as well as structural and tonal similarities which appear mainly at the beginning and the end of the text. Like his wife’s poem. Browning’s is in his own voice, opens with his view of Florence from the windows of Casa Guidi, links the poet’s visits of churches to the discussion of the interrelation of generations of artists, and chooses Giotto’s unfinished campanile to the cathedral of Florence as a symbol of undaunted aspiration.

The poem repeats in a more radical way the move from initial subjectivity to objectivity already encountered in ‘The Guardian-Angel’. The first two stanzas recall a Romantic description of nature, especially through the Wordsworthian echo of the leaping eel (2) as a symbol of spontaneous joy. The unusual presentation of an urban space as a landscape with aloes and olive trees draws attention to this deliberately

Romantic motif. The associative progression from an observation of natural phenomena

to an abstract reflection is reminiscent of the Romantic meditative lyric, but the generic expectations built up in this opening are disappointed by the somewhat impudent apostrophe to Giotto, which leads to a very un-Romantic middle section. The first hne o f stanza hi reads indeed like the characteristic dramatic address at the opening of a dramatic monologue. Despite some lingering lyrical phrases in stanza iv and the

speaker’s assumption of the stance of a Romantic vates, who ‘By a gift God grants me

now and then’ (30) has a vision o f the spirits of the pre-1500 primitive painters (the so- called ‘old masters’), the tone of the utterance becomes increasingly discursive and conversational. When he addresses the Italian public in stanzas vii-xx, the inclusion of their direct speech (81), colloquialisms like ‘what matters’ (152) or ‘heigh ho’ (184) and exhorting imperatives render the poem quasi-dialogic. Yet the inserted metalinguistic remark ‘(ends my allocution)’ (159) indicates that at this point the speaker switches to a retrospective self-observation and becomes aware of his

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authoritative tone. The defence of the old masters against the public’s depreciation and the speaker’s self-conscious admission of his communicative intention also resemble the defence of Guercino in ‘The Guardian-Angel’.

In contrast to the earlier poem, however, Browning here seizes the occasion to voice his aesthetics. He wants to correct the public’s failure properly to appreciate the old masters. The public does not understand that older ‘primitive’ painters were ‘Art’s spring-birth’ (178) and prepared the ground for the achievements of the High Renaissance. To make this point. Browning juxtaposes the innovative old masters with those of their contemporaries who adhered to the exhausted classical tradition. The implicit reference seems to be to the mannerism of the Byzantine school. Browning revises established standards by reinterpreting the ideal of classical perfection as sterility, inferior to the ‘primitive’ painters whose imperfection he values as a potential for vital growth and future improvement.'®

The passionate interest which the speaker takes in this subject is not surprising, given the analogies between the old masters and Browning’s own aesthetics and reputation: the old masters are ‘self-acquainters, / And paint man man’ (147-8). They not only attempt to replace unattainable ideals with realism and depict man in the context of ordinary life as Browning does, but they are also expressly praised for their self-consciousness, which made them turn their ‘eyes inwardly one fine day’ (114). This, I believe, shows that Browning conceives of the early Renaissance as the historical period which discovers the principle of second order observation as a factor in aesthetic creation and appreciation. The old masters are the first to shift the focus of attention from the observation of ideal, but typified, petrified emotions and external matter to the observer’s point of view and motives. Aesthetics and religion interweave because second order observation allows the old masters to attain a deeper insight into the human psyche and thus ‘To bring the invisible full into play’ (151), i.e. to portray the soul as opposed to Greek paganism and Renaissance worldliness." The combination of spirituality and a style accused of being ‘rough-hewn, nowise polished’ (126)

'® This attitude must be seen in the contemporary context o f the Gothic revival, which paradoxically associated Attic classical art with political conservatism and feudal Gothic art with liberalism.

" For the influence on Browning o f A lexis François R io’s em phasis on the spiritual and moral dimension of paintings, see DeLaura ( ‘C ontext’). Cf. also ‘W ith Gerard de Lairesse’: ‘You saw the body, ’tis the soul we se e’ (173). It was indeed due to their strong faith without regard to technical perfection in their paintings that the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood chose the early R enaissance painters for their m odel (Korg 102).

certainly corresponds to Browning’s concept of his own poetry. The old masters’ technical imperfections are excused by their difficult stance as innovating pioneers who prepare the ground for the accomplished High Renaissance masters, so that they should be treated with indulgence and imaginative sympathy. We will see in the analyses of several poems that Browning frequently conceives of himself as the type of the unacknowledged predecessor of a new poetic tradition who will only be properly appreciated after his death.

None of the ideas developed so far are undermined by the enunciation. This is not surprising as the inclusion of art criticism within a literary text indicates that the speaker has a high degree of self-consciousness which leaves little space for blind spots. Still, he prefers to distance his self-observation by transferring it onto pictorial art, although the parallel between the painters and Browning remains quite obvious. References to literature are conscientiously avoided, except for the joking sting in the remark that the supreme reward of the greatest High Renaissance painters is to become ‘poets’ in heaven (55).'^ The device of indirect self-observation through a thinly veiled hetero-observation has two advantages. Firstly, it can be read as a strategy to achieve a better reputation through changing the readers’ fundamental outlook on aesthetics without having to argue overtly that they should apply their new insights to Browning. Secondly, self-conceptualisation as an artist is so central to Browning - who in his youth decided never to take up a profession and to become a full-time poet (Gosse 20 and 84) - that it is understandable he should wish to place the observation of his own lack of fame at some remove from himself.

The same holds true for an even more intimate instance of self-revelation, the declaration of Browning’s optimistic faith, which the speaker does not formally endorse. The opening of this passage, ‘There’s a fancy some lean to and others hate - ’ (161), dismisses the optimists’ point of view as a mere ‘fancy’ and attributes it to a limited number of people - excluding the speaker himself - while pointing to an alternative. This alternative is given as much space as the first opinion, although it is clearly not the creed which the poem undertakes to promote. Moreover, the speaker seems uncertain which side to take. He cannot judge the truth of the first, optimistic creed, saying ‘Yet I hardly know’ (169), and admits to being attracted by the less

'■ This need not be taken as a conscious effort to heighten the value o f poetry. The hierarchy o f arts is based on the medieval classification o f artes liberates like poetry as superior to artes m echanicae, to which painting belongs (Weikert 119).

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complex concept of rest from earthly striving in heaven. At the same time, the remark ‘And I have had troubles enough, for one’ (176) allows Browning to slip in another oblique allusion reminding us of his unjustly poor reputation.

In contrast to the backing of the enounced by the enunciation on the subjects of aesthetics and religion, the next section (stanzas xxiii-xxxi), which shows the speaker in the less intimate role of an art amateur, displays an ironic distance between the textual levels.'^ The speaker addresses several old masters, complaining that they permit their lost works to be rediscovered and bought not by him but by avaricious ‘dealers and stealers, Jews and the English’ (228). Of course. Browning as an Englishman falls into the latter category, but this paradox can be attributed to the author’s genuine

conviction that he is a true art lover and distinct from the nouveau riche tourists and

collectors. Ironically, the catalogue of hypothetical paintings which the fictional Browning would like to discover includes works which the real Browning already owns, namely Taddeo Gaddi’s ‘St Jerome’, Margheritone’s ‘Crucifixion with Saints’ and Pollaiuolo’s ‘Christ at the Column’. What can be the motivation for this divergence of fact and fiction? Out of collector’s pride, Browning the man might be using the

medium of his poem to point out what a fine connoisseur of pictorial art he is, while

making a private joke for an intimate circle of readers who know his collection.

For Browning the author, these paintings serve as raw material out o f which he can develop a deliberate self-parody. Whereas the earlier Hudibrastic rhymes ‘Theseus’ / ‘knees’ use’ (98, 100) and ‘Giotto!’ / ‘([...] not?) “O! ” (133, 135) do not produce much of a comic effect, the language employed in this section exposes the speaker so obviously to ridicule that the author must be tongue-in-cheek - if the speaker is not

also self-mocking. A crescendo of indignation leads from relatively humble questions

using the polite conditional ‘Could [...]?’, via the irreverent address to Margheritone as ‘You bald old saturnine poll-clawed parrot’ (220), to the second apostrophe to Giotto. The speaker is too excited to remember whether he visited the church of San Spirito or Ognissanti in his hunt for forgotten treasures. His inability to think clearly is also manifest in the increasingly fragmented, breathless syntax, with repetitions such as ‘to

The change in the relation o f enounced and enunciation m ight also be due to a temporal gap in the com position, which Weikert (134) assum es and which would facilitate a critical self-observation.

A ccording to the 1913 Southeby’s auction catalogue, m ost o f these paintings, such as the Gaddi and the M argheritone, were falsely attributed (Ormond 199; Weikert 130-1), so that B row ning’s claim to be an art expert is undermined.

whom? - to whom?’ (240), an abundance of exclamation marks, phrases without a predicate, and the comically melodramatic ‘I, that have haunted the dim San Spirito’ (241) rhyming with ‘Patient on altar-step planting a weary toe!’ (243). At this moment, when the irony is so obvious, the speaker finally states in the enounced his realisation of how absurd he is. In a parallel to his remark in line 159, ‘(ends my allocution)’, he switches to a critical observation of his own discourse and evaluates his choice of the Koh-i-noor diamond for a metaphor as ‘a platitude’ (245).*^

The only way out of this ridiculous plaintive pose is an abrupt change of subject. The final prophecy is an ideal solution to divert attention from the speaker, because it is by definition divinely inspired and thus independent of the prophet’s personality. In three respects, the prophecy marks a circular return to the beginning of the text: it focuses on Giotto’s campanile, reverts to the initial visionary mode of utterance, and is

full of echoes of Casa Guidi Windows. In the middle section. Browning avoids the

political animus which dominates EBB’s poem. Instead, he develops a purely aesthetic

minor detail - her defence of Cimabue’s technical deficiencies (COW I, 351-61) - into

the main point of his poem. Similarities persist as he transposes political elements from her poem onto an artistic plane, for instance by substituting the daring of dead patriots and national poets with the creative innovations of the old masters. Significantly, his use of the word ‘revolution’ (157) is limited to an aesthetic meaning, and whereas EBB evokes Niobe as an analogy for Italy whose children are being killed in their struggle

for freedom (COW I, 32), in Browning’s poem she has a purely aesthetic function as a

classical topos for the basic emotion of grief (102).

The sudden introduction of the political theme in the coda is an interpretative crux that is usually criticised as an incoherence. But the fact that Browning does this in

three other poems - ‘England in Italy’, “De Gustibus and ‘Cenciaja’ - suggests

that the abrupt transition is no coincidence. It would in fact not have been discouraged by EBB, who praises this very move in ‘England in Italy’ by declaring that it ‘gives

unity to the whole., just what the poem wanted’ (21-22 October 1845, Corr. 11: 134).

Two critics discern in this apparent disjunction an underlying unity. Julia Markus (50) argues that the close relation between art and politics was so obvious to the Brownings and their Florentine circle that they forgot it was less so for the British public, and that

Besides, the appropriation o f the jew el for the imperial crown also makes it an inappropriate reference in a poem advocating democratic revolution.

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Browning therefore did not see the need for a smooth transition. This interpretation still implies that the poem is artistically flawed because it does not make the connection apparent in its structure. More concerned with the literary dimension of the text, John Woolford tries to discover a unity by interpreting the discussion of architecture and painting not as an aim in itself, but as an extended metaphor for the Italian revolution. He sees the poem as an instance of what he calls a ‘discursive’ ‘displacement of

political onto aesthetic discourses’ (Woolford and Karlin Browning 181-2). Though the

stance on Italian politics is certainly a major concern, this would make it a primarily political text and devalue the importance of the speaker’s aesthetic and religious self- definition. These issues, which take up so much space, in my view constitute the central interest of the poem.

In contrast to Markus and Woolford, who read the text as a second order observation of politics without taking into account the set-up of the text as a second order observation of its speaker, I wish to argue that the thematic break is a deliberate authorial strategy. It is made so flagrant in order to dramatise within the consciousness of the speaker the practical impossibility of bridging the gap between the political

poetry of Casa Guidi Windows and Browning’s paramount concern with aesthetics.

Throughout most of the poem, the speaker successfully avoids imitating EBB’s political discourse by ‘aestheticising’ it and speaking for his individual self rather than presuming - as she does - to be the voice of the people. But as a result of his problematic self-observation in stanza xxxi just before the coda, he tries in the coda to divert attention from himself by adopting EBB’s prophetic mode and forcing her

political concern onto his utterance. The speaker takes pains to emulate Casa Guidi

Windows: he acknowledges his debt through the bracketed reference ‘(Ex: “Casa

Guidi,” quod videas ante)' (260) and many verbal echoes - e.g. the civil guard’s

shooting the sky, Orcagna and the stone of Dante - including the playful reversal of

‘the fair side of the Alps’ (CGW I, 1081) in ‘the worse side o f the Mont Saint Gothard’

(251).

Nevertheless, in the enunciation a resistance can be felt to considering aesthetics as a mere means to a higher political end in that the coda surreptitiously continues to reverse the hierarchy of politics and art. Of course, ‘Pure A rt’ and the republic are

associated in Casa Guidi Windows, but priority is always given to politics, whereas in

prologize, how we shall perorate’ (265),'^ literary discourse is given precedence over political eloquence. While EBB wants to use art to incite the people to a revolution, Browning speaks of the importance of democracy as providing favourable conditions for the flowering of art. His Witanagemot

Shall ponder, once Freedom restored to Florence, H ow Art may return that departed with her. (261-2)

Likewise, the ‘hated house’ of Habsburg-Lorraine will be replaced not by another dynasty but by the artist Orcagna (263-4).*^

The final vision of the completed campanile poses another problem. Although it is a suitable metaphor for the construction of a unified Italy with the assistance of art in

Casa Guidi Windows, its celebration of closure contradicts the advocacy of imperfection at the heart of Browning’s poem. The speaker appears here to make a final effort to emulate the discourse of his model, but it is improbable that, after having maintained a critical distance throughout most of the poem, the author with his higher consciousness is blind to this markedly inconsistent privileging o f closure. The deferral of the tower’s completion to an indefinite future, and the building’s original function as a symbol of the free sovereignty and civic unity of the fourteenth-century Florentine state'* whose constitution was still far from democratic, hint that closure and a democratic Italy are indeed unattainable.

Similarly, even though the final word is I ’ with its association o f confident subjectivity, the poem does not end on an unconditional submission to the pattern of

Casa Guidi Windows. The last stanza furnishes further indications that an enthusiastic personal involvement in EBB’s manner is not wholeheartedly endorsed. As Woolford remarks in his comparison of the proof sheets and the first edition, the textual revisions make this stanza increasingly impersonal and less naively enthusiastic (Woolford and

Karlin Browning 29). In the proofs, the speaker experiences the removal of the tower’s

scaffold in the company of Giotto and in the present tense, whereas in the published version the event is located in the future and the doubting interrogative phrase ‘Shall I

The hidden allusion to his own ‘Artem is Prologizes’, which was intended as a prologue to the