"Old Pictures in Florence," Robert Browning

[teenybuffalo]

(rushthatspeaks has been posting a travelogue of art and culture from a recent trip to Florence.  Highly recommended reading.  Consequently, I have had this poem stuck in my head the past few days, and I thought I'd share it with you all.  Welcome to Browning the art lover.)

The morn when first it thunders in March,
     The eel in the pond gives a leap, they say;

Comments

[negothick]

Thanks for the poem--it IS appropriate.
This note is a sublime understatement:
"The humorous rhyme "did it--quiddit" is but one of the many whimsical rhyming effects in the poem."
He really rhymed "Ghirlandajo" with "Heigh-ho!": A rhyme worthy of Gilbert.

[teenybuffalo]

He certainly does get into silly rhymes later in the poem (Theseus/knees'use), but the first half or so is one of my favorite things he ever wrote, largely because he avoids the painful feminine rhymes that ruin a lot of his other work for me.

[rushthatspeaks]

That has a really good summary of Renaissance humanism, but I have to say that my immediate reaction is, when I get to the endnotes, to see that he owned paintings by a whole bunch of people and then I am all 'HE OWNED A LORENZO MONACO GAH SO JEALOUS GAH', which rather colors the whole experience.

[teenybuffalo]

Yeah, can't blame you there. My own, fairly esoteric reaction is that I think of the town museum where I used to volunteer. We didn't have any earth-shaking works of art or craft, I will admit, but there were decades of costume history and the work of local painters in storage, steadily rotting away or being eaten by moths, and the people who could have done something didn't care, while the people who wanted to do something hadn't any money.

Willful each flake should clasp the brick, each tinge not wholly escape the plaster...