The prophecy with which the poem concludes, of a great revival of Italian art consequent on the advent of political and intellectual liberty, has not obtained fulfilment in the course of the half century that has elapsed since it was uttered. Browning's doctrine that aspiration towards what is higher is more to be valued in art than the attainment of what is lower is a leading motive in the admirable dramatic monologue placed in the lips of Andrea del Sarto, the faultless painter. His craftsmanship is unerring; whatever he imagines he can achieve; nothing in line or in colour is other than it ought to be; and yet precisely because he has succeeded, his failure is profound and irretrievable: Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for? All is silver-grey Placid and perfect with my art: the worse! He could set right the arm which is wrongly put in Rafael's work that fronts him; but "all the play, the insight and the stretch" of Rafael are lacking in his own faultless lines. He looks back regretfully to his kingly days at Fontainebleau with the royal Francis, when what seemed a veritable fire was in his heart. And he tries to find an excuse for his failure as artist and as man in the coldness of his beautiful Lucrezia--for he who has failed in the higher art has also failed in the higher love--Lucrezia, who values his work only by the coins it brings in, and who needs those coins just now for one whose whistle invites her away. All might be so much better otherwise! Yet otherwise he cannot choose that it should be; his art must remain what it is--not golden but silver-grey; and his Lucrezia may attend to the Cousin's whistle if only she retains the charm, not to be evaded, of her beauty.[67] Browning does not mean that art in its passionate pursuit of the highest ends should be indifferent to the means, or that things spiritual do not require as adequate a sensuous embodiment as they are capable of receiving from the painter's brush or the poet's pen. Were art a mere symbol or suggestion, two bits of sticks nailed crosswise might claim to be art as admirable as any. What is the eye for, if not to see with vivid exactness? what is the hand for, if not to fashion things as nature made them? It is through body that we reach after the soul; and the passion for truth and reality is a passion for the invisible which is expressed in and through these. Such is the pleading of Fra Lippo Lippi, the tonsured painter caught out of bounds, in that poem in which the dramatic monologue of Browning attains its perfection of life and energy. Fra Lippo is intoxicated by the mere forms and colours of things, and he is assured that these mean intensely and mean well: The beauty and the wonder and the power, The shapes of things, their colours, lights and shades, Changes, surprises--and God made it all!