_Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day_ (1850), in a section devoted to the reverie of the seeker for religious truth after his inspection of Catholicism at Rome, censures the attitude of the early church toward the physical beauty of the statuary Italy had inherited from Greece. While the subject of the poem is religion, not art, incidentally it contains one of Browning’s best defences of the nude. He viewed the nude as a fitting expression of the beauty God has placed in the world, and rejoiced in the “noble daring, steadfast duty, The heroic in action or in passion,” or even the merely beautiful physique--all as presented in sculpture. In Chapter VI will be found further mention of the nude, in connection with _Francis Furini_ (1887).[171] _The Lady and the Painter_, a non-Italianate poem, published in the Asolando group (1889), also throws further light on Browning’s attitude toward the nude. These two poems are of interest in the present discussion, however, only because they prove the attitude expressed in 1850 to have been a permanent one. In _The Statue and the Bust_, the art references were not introduced for their own sake, but because they suggested a situation with dramatic possibilities. The statue of Duke Ferdinand exists as Browning pictured it. The bust seems to be an addition for poetic purposes, but it conforms to the spirit of the palace decorations, in that it was made of Robbia ware, for traces of that material still adorned the palace when the poem was written. In _Sordello_ (1840), the first poem containing any reference to Italian sculpture, the castle of Goito, the early home of Sordello, is rich in sculpturesque effects. “Those slim pillars, ... Cut like a company of palms--Some knot of bacchanals, flushed cheek combined With straining forehead, shoulders purpled--A dullish grey-streaked cumbrous font ... shrinking Caryatides, Of just-tinged marble--” all present a physical setting. They do more, however, than merely locate. Their lonely magnificence harmonizes with the tone of the story, and they exercise an influence on the nature of the dreaming, beauty-loving Sordello.