The few changes in the facts, however, are comparatively slight, all told. Allowing for mistaken authorities whom Browning followed, variations are much more trivial than might be expected. By the old well-worn charity cloak of poetic license it is customary to allow for considerable idealization. But Browning, the artist of things as they really exist, held to the truth as he saw it, even in his treatment of art. This he did in spite of the fact that his purpose was not to give art history, but to present personality as it existed in relation to art. With his deep insight into human nature, as well as art history, he took the characters which he found in the world of art, the good or bad, and gave them to us as examples of the striving, often unsuccessful soul. CHAPTER VII GENERAL COMPARISONS: BROWNING AND THE FINE ARTS OF ITALY. I. POETIC FUNCTION AND METHOD.--About fifteen poems from Browning deal with the arts or artists of Italy as primary subject matter. The remainder of the entire number of forty-nine which refer to art at all, treat it as a secondary consideration. Taking the subject art as a whole, as Browning introduces it in poetry, it appears in the following forms: (1) main theme; (2) comparison of two or more artists working in the same art; (3) comparison of artists in one art with those in another, as painters with musicians, or with poets; (4) illustrative material when the main theme of the poem has no immediate bearing on art. _Abt Vogler_, in music, or _Fra Lippo Lippi_, in painting, are examples of the first. _Andrea del Sarto_, besides exemplifying the first form, contains numerous comparisons of its main character with other painters. _With Charles Avison_ has a musician as a theme, and he is compared with other artists, for example, Michael Angelo. _Fifine at the Fair_, whose main theme has no connection with art, names Raphael, Bazzi, and Angelo as illustrative material. Numerous instances of incidental art references, used in such ways as these, attest the fact that Browning had a large art consciousness, gained from past interest in the different fields, and of sufficient activity to cause almost constant references to the fine arts. Where Wordsworth would have chosen English natural scenery for purposes of illustration, and Shelley nature in Italy, Browning chose art. Fifteen poems with nature as the main theme, besides numerous others with references to nature, would not seem unusual; but a group of fifteen poems, all moderately long, based on the fine arts, besides a very large number of comparisons to the arts in other poems, seems an exceptional product for a nineteenth century English poet.