I. GENERAL STATEMENT.--Twenty-nine poems contain the names of Italian painters, and fifty-one Italian painters are mentioned by name; while several of the great artists are mentioned in many poems. Michael Angelo is referred to in ten different poems; Raphael in seven, besides the duplicate mention in three sections of _The Ring and the Book_; Correggio, and Titian, each in six poems, and Da Vinci in five different poems. These are all great masters of the High Renaissance in Italy; and therefore, they are the greatest artists the world has known: the repeated introduction of their names is perfectly natural. But among Browning’s fifty-one painters, some of so little importance are named that references to them are rare in histories of art. Even with the most insignificant, some telling phrase is often used to express with admirable precision the artist’s relation to the history of art. The best example of this is found in _Old Pictures in Florence_, where the poet capriciously calls the roll of the past Florentine artists, chiding them because none of their works have come into his possession. In the one poem seventeen men who have been classified as painters, besides some who are sculptors and architects primarily, find a place. Only two or three of the artists are given more than a line or two; but many of even the most insignificant are summed up in some phrase like the following: “Da Vincis derive in good time from Dellos;” “Stefano ... called Nature’s Ape and the world’s despair;” “the wronged Lippino,” or “my Pollajolo, the twice a craftsman.” II. EXTENT OF BROWNING’S KNOWLEDGE.--To cover the entire field as he does, from Cimabue through the Renaissance and down to modern times (for he omits almost no artist of importance in the whole history of painting, besides including many surprises in the way of insignificant ones), Browning must have had a wonderful amount of historical knowledge. This familiarity with the development of the art was gained in three ways--by some study of the subject before he went to Italy, by reading histories of the painters after going there, and by visiting galleries and churches in Italy and studying the pictures found therein.