98. _Or what's a heaven for._ According to Browning's theory, perfection gained and rested in means stagnation. Aspiration toward the unattainable is the condition of growth. The artist who can satisfy himself with such themes as can be completely expressed by his art, is on a low level of experience and attainment. 105. _The Urbinate._ Raphael Sanzio of Urbino, one of the greatest of Italian painters. He died in 1520; hence the date of this poem is supposed to be 1525. 136. _Agnolo._ Michael Agnolo (less correctly, Angelo), 1475-1566, great both as sculptor and painter. 149. _Francis._ Francis I of France was a patron of the arts. When Andrea was thirty-two and had been married five years, King Francis sent for him to come to Fontainebleau, the most sumptuous of the French royal palaces. Andrea greatly enjoyed the splendor and hospitality of the French court, and he was happy in his successful work, when Lucrezia called him home. He obtained a vacation of two months and took with him money with which to make purchases for the French king. This money he used to buy a house for Lucrezia. 241. _Scudi._ Italian coins worth about ninety-six cents each. 261. _Four great walls._ _Revelation_, xxi, 15-17. 263. _Leonardo._ Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), one of the greatest of Italian painters. THE BISHOP ORDERS HIS TOMB AT ST. PRAXED'S CHURCH There is an old church in Rome named in honor of St. Praxed or Praxedes. The Bishop's Tomb, however, "is entirely fictitious, although something which is made to stand for it is now shown to credulous sightseers." (Mrs. Orr, _Handbook to Robert Browning's Works_, p. 247.) Ruskin says of this poem: "Robert Browning is unerring in every sentence he writes of the Middle Ages--always vital, right, and profound, so that in the matter of art, with which we are specially concerned, there is hardly a principle connected with the medieval temper that he has not struck upon in these seemingly careless and too rugged lines of his.... I know no other piece of modern English prose or poetry in which there is so much told, as in these lines, of the Renaissance spirit--its worldliness, inconsistency, pride, hypocrisy, ignorance of itself, love of art, of luxury, and of good Latin. It is nearly all that I have said of the central Renaissance, in thirty pages of 'The Stones of Venice,' put into as many lines, Browning's also being the antecedent work." (_Modern Painters_, Vol. iv, pp. 337-9.) "It was inevitable that the great period of the Renaissance should produce men of the type of the Bishop of St. Praxed; it would be grossly unfair to set him down as the type of the churchmen of his time." Berdoe, _Browning Cyclopaedia_, p. 81. 1. _Vanity, saith the preacher, vanity._ Cf. ll. 8-9, 51-52, as illustrative of the religious professionalism of the Bishop's talk. He drops into the ecclesiastical conception of life and death, and into the phraseology of his order.