Browning's artistic self-restraint is admirable; he has his own truth to utter aloud if he should please; but here he will not play the prophet; the life of eighteenth-century Venice is dust and ashes; the poet will say not a word more than the musician has said in his toccata; the ruthlessness of time and death make him a little remorseful; it is enough, and too much, that through this music of the hours of love and pleasure we should hear, as it were, the fall of the clay upon a coffin-lid.
Shelley was more impressed by the sculpture than the paintings of Italy.
There are few evidences of the influence of the most ideal of the arts that appeal to the mind through the eye in Browning's poetry; and his sympathies would be more apt to respond to such work as Michael Angelo's, which sends the spectator beyond itself, than to the classical work which has the absoluteness and the calm of attained perfection.[66] The sensuous and the spiritual qualities of colour were vividly felt by him; a yellowing old marble seemed perhaps to impose itself with a cold authority upon the imagination.

But the suggestion of two portrait busts of the period of classical decadence, one in marble representing a boy, and the other the powerful head of a man in granite, gave rise to _Protus_, one of the few flawless poems of Browning.

His mastery over the rhymed couplet is nowhere seen to greater advantage, unless it be in a few passages of _Sordello_.

The poem is, however, more a page from history than a study in the fine arts; and Browning's imagination has made it a page which lives in our memory through a pathos veiled under strong objective touches, never protruding itself sentimentally in quest of tenderness or pity.
"I spent some most delightful time," Rossetti wrote to Allingham shortly after the publication of _Men and Women_, "with Browning at Paris, both in the evenings and at the Louvre, where (and throughout conversation) I found his knowledge of early Italian art beyond that of any one I ever met--_encyclopedically_ beyond that of Ruskin himself." The poem _Old Pictures at Florence_, which Rossetti calls "a jolly thing," and which is that and much more, is full of Browning's learned enthusiasm for the early Italian painters, and it gives a reason for the strong attraction which their adventures after new beauty and passion had for him as compared with the faultless achievements of classical sculpture.

Greek art, according to Browning, by presenting unattainable ideals of material and mundane perfection, taught men to submit.