Let our effort be to represent beauty by the perfect drawing of the body in repose and in action, and by chosen attitudes and types.

Let our composition follow certain guiding lines and rules, in accordance with whose harmonies all pictures shall be made.

We will follow the Greek; compose as he did, and by his principles; and for that purpose make a scientific study of the body of man; observing in all painting, sculpture, and architecture the general forms and proportions that ancient art, after many experiments, selected as the best.

And, to match that, we must have perfect drawing in all we do." This great change, which, as art's adulterous connection with science deepened, led to such unhappy results, Browning represents, when its aim had been reached, in his poem, _Andrea del Sarto_; and he tells us--through Andrea's talk with his wife Lucretia--what he thought of it; and what Andrea himself, whose broken life may have opened his eyes to the truth of things, may himself have thought of it.

On that element in the poem I have already dwelt, and shall only touch on the scenery and tragedy, of the piece: We sit with Andrea, looking out to Fiesole.
sober, pleasant Fiesole.
There's the bell clinking from the chapel top; That length of convent-wall across the way Holds the trees safer, huddled more inside; The last monk leaves the garden; days decrease, And autumn grows, autumn in everything.
As the poem goes on, the night falls, falls with the deepening of the painter's depression; the owls cry from the hill, Florence wears the grey hue of the heart of Andrea; and Browning weaves the autumn and the night into the tragedy of the painter's life.
That tragedy was pitiful.