Neo-classical and Romantic Influences

Neo-classical and Romantic Influences

NEO-CLASSICAL and ROMANTIC Influences

  • Neo-classical Inheritance
    • The epistolary novel
    • The picaresque novel
    • The didactic novel
    • The comedy of manners
  • Romantic Inheritance
    • The gothic novel
  • Thematic influences
    • Manipulation of space and time
    • Medieval
      • Quest for the sublimation of the self
      • Temptation of sin
      • Legendary Arthur
      • Deep religious background
      • A return to the roots / origins
      • Victorian use of medieval elements
        • Neo-gothic architecture
        • Painting, sculpture, tapestries
        • Literature
        • WHY?
    • Renaissance
      • Connections with Victorian Age
        • Humanism
        • Hellenism
        • Sensuous aestheticism
        • Religious fragmentation
        • Contrast between Hellenism and Hebraism
      • Renaissance ideas filtered by Romantic and Victorian perspectives:
        • MAN IS IN THE CENTRE
          • The Darwinian theory
          • Man creating the perfect society
          • Man in the centre
          • Man as creator, challenging God
          • The loss of faith in God
          • Man in the centre ➔ Woman is also in the centre
        • The World as a stage
          • sudden appearances and disappearances
          • Plays changed into novels
          • dramatic monologue
          • Strong rhetoric
        • Shakespeare
        • Renaissance Italy on the theme of Art

Neoclassical Inheritance

The epistolary novel
  • In Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1747-1748), Samuel Richardson:
    • highly personal, confessional tone
    • 1st person narrative
    • the reader’s empathetic response
  • 1st person narrative often used by Victorian novelists
  • epistolary echoes in mid-19th century: Anne Bronte’s Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Charles Dickens’ Bleak House
  • confessional tone of W. M. Thackeray in Vanity Fair when addressing the reader:
    • “I know that the tune I am piping is a very mild one (although there are some terrific chapters coming presently), and must beg the good- natured READER to remember that we are only discoursing at present about a stockbroker's family in Russell Square, who are taking walks, or luncheon, or dinner, or talking and making love as people do in common life, and without a single passionate and wonderful incident to mark the progress of their loves.”
The picaresque novel
  • Henry Fielding, in Joseph Andrews (1742), Tom Jones (1749) & Tobias Smollett's Roderick Random (1748) ➔ followed a picaresque hero against a vivid panorama of lower-class society
  • Between 1759 and 1767, Laurence Sterne wrote his comic masterpiece The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, in which the hero, who is the narrator, is not born until halfway through the book
  • Most of Victorian heroes/heroines are also orphans, but their adventures are not so very much in space, they are inner “adventures”, they evolve (Pip, Jane Eyre, David Copperfield)
  • Unlike the 18th c. picaresque hero, who was a trickster, the Vic. hero/heroine (of picaresque influence) has a tendency to keep his/her moral status intact
The didactic novel
  • theories of education and politics were expressed.
  • Most famous was the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Émile; ou, Traité de l'éducation (1762).
  • A British didactic novel was Caleb Williams (1794), by the political philosopher William Godwin → didactic tone of the author
  • A Victorian reminiscence of the 18th c didactic novel is to be found in the didactic tone of the author
The comedy of manners
  • it deals with the clash between characters formed by particular cultural and social conditions.
  • The great example was Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice, 1813; Emma, 1816)→ comic typology

Neoclassical inheritance

  • In perspective ➔ Society seen as a mechanism in which human beings are (mechanical) parts for the whole device to run well; in some Victorian novels the stress falls on town life, social classes and the responsibility of the individual
  • the sovereignty and competence of reason to determine the right choice

Romantic influences

The Gothic novel:
  • the element of horror is created by the use of apparitions, supernatural manifestations, chains, dungeons, tombs, and nature in its more terrifying aspects.
  • The first Gothic novel was Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764).
  • Later examples are Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's Frankenstein (1818).----→ dark characters, mysterious settings and situations, unexplained manifestations
Thematic influences: Medieval and Renaissance
  • The Victorians manipulated
    • SPACE - the Imperial expansion developed the need for exoticism & for civilising “savageness”
    • TIME - the past- history and culture ➔ The Middle Ages and Renaissance

MEDIEVAL INFLUENCES

A./ Rich medieval material
  • The medieval way of thinking and expressing itself offered the 19th c. a very rich material:
    • They adopted both the medieval quest for self sublimation (the Holy Grail) and the attraction of sin
    • glorious historical events
    • legendary cultural background : the Arthurian cycle
      • the model of the knight: loyalty to God, the king, his lady, bravery, sublimation
      • the rise & fall of social harmony: Camelot, the Knights of the Round Table
      • theme of love:
        • marital love: Arthur and Guenevere
        • sinful love: Lancelot and Guenevere
        • unaccomplished love: Shalott and Guenevere
MEDIEVAL INFLUENCES
  • the spiritual quest, the search for the Holy Grail
    • renunciation of worldly pleasures
    • moral, simple, serious life
    • the power to suffer for a promised after-life
    • the historical Biblical past brought into the present
  • deep religious background
  • a return to the roots, to the origins (pre-Christian, Christian)- an attempt at defining the present, the identity of a nation
Medieval Influences

  • B./ Victorian use of medieval elements. Victorian literature & art made use of medievalism

  • I. Neo-Gothic architecture—religious (churches, cathedrals) and secular (The Houses of Parliament built between 1840-1860)

    • A return to the past through architecture by interpreting the medieval Gothic. It is characterised by eclecticism. The visible stress on dematerialization and spiritualization. Dark, mysterious, serious atmosphere. The religious loses its sublimation in secular buildings, still trying to preserve something of it. The Neo-Gothic details become fashionable and are meant to build an atmosphere of the past

  • II./ Painting, sculpture, tapestries.

    • The Pre- Raphaelite movement & William Morris ( Arts and Crafts movement )
    • Characteristics: sentimentality, sweetness, lost essence
    • Examples:
      • the theme of guilt and forgiveness ( Arthur and Guenevere )
      • the change of roles (King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid by Edward Burne-Jones—1884)
      • the unaccomplished love ( The Lady of Shalott by William Holman Hunt—1886, The Beguiling of Merlin by Edward Burne- Jones—1874)
      • religious themes (Christ in the House of his Parents by John Everett Millais—1850, The Annunciation by Dante Gabriel Rossetti—1850 and 1855)

  • III./ Literature: The Neo-Gothic influences coming from Romanticism: violent, thrilling feelings, dark atmosphere.

    • NOVEL: Dickens (Great Expectations, David Copperfield), The Brontes, George Eliot (Silas Marner), Thomas Hardy.
    • ESSAY: John Ruskin (The Stones of Venice: The Savageness of Gothic Architecture)
    • POETRY: A. Tennyson, R. Browning, G. M. Hopkins, D. G. Rossetti, W. Morris
Medieval influences

  • C./ The reasons Victorians made use of the medieval past:

    • to manipulate the past & reinforce a present idea
      • The medieval Gothic style in defence of the Chartist movement: the 19th c worker should be a creative thinker, not a machine, a tool.
      • In THE SAVAGENESS OF GOTHIC ARCHITECTURE (1850-52), John Ruskin defends the barbaric, stern, rude Gothic architecture bec. those medieval builders had the freedom of the detail even though it was imprisoned within the power of the religious message. They were imaginative, creative, unique. They built cathedrals in that particular Gothic style because they mirrored the environment they lived in: Mountains—high cathedrals, cold misty weather—dark, mysterious atmosphere in the cathedrals. The present builders/workers are enslaved by machines, they simply reproduce a pattern imposed by patrons and their machines.
      • Political reinforcement of the present and a warning: legendary past failure for present success
        • Alfred Tennyson, THE IDYLLS OF THE KING (1859-1885). 12 books (chapters) that highlight different moments from the Arthurian legends (the influence of Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur).
        • Several titles from The Idylls…:Guenevere, Lancelot and Elaine, Merlin and the gleam, Morte d’Arthur, The Passing of Arthur.
        • Themes
          • the struggle of the elite to restore order in situations of chaos and anarchy
          • the rise and fall of a civilization—a memento and a warning for the present monarchy (Queen Victoria and Prince Albert whom Tennyson dedicated these poems for and whom Tennyson compared with King Arthur)
Medieval influences

  • Catholic religious reinforcement:

    • Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)- the medieval scholasticism brought into focus.
    • He was influenced by the medieval Duns Scotus- Scottish theologian & philosopher, founder of Scotism. He believed in the existence of God to whom one could reach by knowledge & revelation. Through faith the soul became immortal & incorruptible. He sustained the primacy of WILL, LOVE, FREEDOM over the Intellect.
    • Hopkins was also influenced by the Oxford movement.
    • He underwent a religious crisis and became a Jesuit priest.
    • His religious poetry (THE WINDHOVER, THE LEADEN ECHO AND THE GOLDEN ECHO) shows that everything is connected with everything in the universe because it was created by God and he is everywhere. Everything RHYMES in the world, it is harmonious since it has a common origin: the Creator. In every manifestation of the matter, there is a pattern, an INSCAPE, and things communicate with one another by invisible forces, energies that Hopkins called INSTRESS.

  • 2. The Arthurian legendary past- a symbolic source for philosophising the relationship artist-world, dream- reality.

    • In Alfred Tennyson’s LADY OF SHALOTT, the artist is caught between the world of illusions, of creation (the mirror) and the need to enjoy life (the window). Living means the death of creation

      There she weaves by night and day
      A magic web with colours gay.
      She has heard a whisper say,
      A curse is on her if she stay
      To look down to Camelot.
      She knows not what the curse may be,
      And so she weaveth steadily,
      And little other care hath she,
      The Lady of Shalott.

Medieval influences

  • The model of the medieval knight- the knight’s quest for the ultimate truth is an opportunity for Robert Browning to describe the adventure of plunging into the experience of death and the adventure of seeing life as a Wasteland. ( CHILDE ROLAND TO THE DARK TOWER CAME )

  • Suitable medieval models for the Victorian themes of love

    • a./ CELESTIAL. Intertextuality- a dialogue between Dante’s Divina Commedia and Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s BLESSED DAMOZEL. In Rossetti’s poem, heaven is a sad, lonely place with weeping lovers are waiting for their pairs. Beatrice expresses the eternal idea of love and reunion with the beloved in an Adamic heaven before the fall. God is unimportant.
    • b./ EROTIC. Understanding adulterous love: William Morris’ DEFENCE OF GUENEVERE (1858)
Medieval Influences

  • Arts and Crafts Movement, art movement of the last half of the 19th century that strove to revitalize handicrafts and applied arts during an era of increasing mass production.

    • The movement coalesced in 1861, when the English designer William Morris founded the firm of Morris, Marshall, & Faulkner. Arguing that the true basis of art lay in the crafts, Morris and his followers attacked the sterility and ugliness of machine-made products; his firm promoted hand-made textiles, books, wallpaper, and furniture.

    • The Pre-Raphaelite Movement or Brotherhood was initiated in 1848 by three painters:

      • a./ Dante Gabriel Rossetti ( also a poet ) – Dante Gabriel Rossetti made use of blurred lines, chiaroscuro and a hazy, dreamlike atmosphere.
      • b./ William Holman Hunt (the oldest in the group at that time: 21 years old).
      • c./ John Everett Millais.
      • Hunt and Millais used strong and brilliant lighting, a clear atmosphere, and a near-photographic reproduction of minute details. They mainly referred to biblical and medieval literary themes.

Renaissance Influence

A. Connections between the Renaissance and the Victorian age
  • You can notice a similitude between the Renaissance and the Victorian age: the development of humanism in the Renaissance and that of science in Victorianism by a return to Hellenism ( Ancient Classicism) through the Age of Reason ( Neo-Classicism ) for the Victorians.
  • The taste for Hellenism also reached Victorians through a Romantic filter: they were interested in ruined ancient villas and temples.
  • Walter Pater’s theory of sensuous aestheticism developed in Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) speaks about the knowledge of beauty reached by feeling and pleasurable sensations. In this way, he filters a long tradition of Romantic, Renaissance & Ancient Classical approach to life through the senses. From Studies in the History of the Renaissance, the Preface: “to know beauty, one must have a certain kind of temperament, the power of being deeply moved by it, because beauty cannot be defined by abstract notions.”
Renaissance Influence

  • Connections between the Renaissance and the Victorian age

    • In 1517, Martin Luther initiated the Protestant movement against the Catholic church asking for its moral revival (Reformation). In the same century and the next, the Catholics fought back, trying to restore, revive their lost power (Counter- Reformation).
    • As if in a mirror, the 19th c. witnessed a religious struggle between the Anglicans & the Non-Conformists, between the Evangelicalists and the Catholics, etc. The Oxford Movement in England attempted to bring back some of the first Christian precepts of the Catholics, this way fighting against the weaknesses of the Anglican clergy.
    • In both the Renaissance & the Victorian age a contrast between Hellenism and Christianity (Hebraism) is felt. Matthew Arnold speaks about this contrast when referring to the 19th c. Britain in his essay Culture and Anarchy, chapter 4 called Hebraism and Hellenism (1869):
Hellenism and Hebraism
  • Hebraism and Hellenism: both approaches have the same goal: man’s perfection or salvation.
    • Hellenism aspires to get rid of ignorance by means of reason & see reality in its beauty, as it was believed to be.
    • With Hebraism, the beauty of life cannot be felt completely, man cannot perfect himself because of sin.
    • Each of these perspectives were more powerful at times & represent contributions to the human spirit.
Hebraism and Hellenism

  • Hebraism and Hellenism

    • common aim → salvation, happiness, perfection

  • Hebraism

    • strictness of consciousness; obedience and proper consciousness; becoming conscious of sin
    • Medievalism
    • →J. Ruskin, T. Carlyle, Ch. Dickens, G. Eliot, E. Gaskell, R. Browning, E. Barrett Browning ➔prophetic mode, social protest, conversion, middle-class topics

  • Hellenism

    • spontaneity of consciousness; see things as they really are → knowledge and reason; avoidance of sin; Sweetness and light = beauty and intelligence
    • Renaissance
    • →M. Arnold, D.G. Rossetti, A. Swinburne, W. Pater, O. Wilde ➔ elitist subjects, emphasis on clarity, use of classical myth
Renaissance influence

  • B. Renaissance ideas filtered by Romantic and Victorian perspectives:

    • Man is in the Centre of the Universe

      • a/ The Darwinian theory : man at the top of the animal kingdom. A theory which very well sustained the 19th c British Imperialism (started by Queen Elizabeth I in the 16th c). The British man- the conqueror of civilisations, the tamer of wilderness, the elitist leader.
      • Examples: Joseph Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Books (1894 and 1895) [Kipling - imperialist persuasions ➔ sense of a civilizing mission that required every Englishman, or, more broadly, every white man, to bring European culture to the heathen natives of the uncivilized world (Britannica 2003)], Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations ( the definition of the gentleman ), George Bernard Shaw’s Devil’s Disciple (1901)
Renaissance influence

  • b/ Man creating the perfect society: UTOPIA.

    • Thomas Morus’ Utopia (1516): all should work and share equally: universal education, lands, goods and have religious toleration.

    • The 19th c socialist William Morris wrote News from Nowhere (1890) in which he built a utopian socialist commonwealth in England.

    • 1621, Robert Burton’ s Anatomy of Melancholy ➔man could get rid of melancholy by means of hard work, duty & serious behaviour. (➔Victorian utilitarianism)

    • Examples: Charles Dickens’ Hard Times, Thomas Carlyle ( for whom work means everything), Walter Pater: in La Gioconda (Studies in the History of the Renaissance) expresses the idea that the work of art contains within all the past & future development of art.

    • c/ The Renaissance, influenced by the ancient Greek approach of the world, places man in the centre He can know everything in the world through reason or/ and through feeling (CARPE DIEM).

    • Walter Pater ➔ the world should be explored through the power of the senses so that the moment could be fully felt.

      In the poems Ulysses (by Tennyson) and Prospice (by Browning) the speaking
      voices share the idea that one should die gloriously, being aware of it, watching
      and feeling the transition from one dimension to another.

      Come my friends,
      ‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
      Push off, and sitting well in order smite
      The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
      To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
      Of all the western stars, until I die.
      It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
      It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
      And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
      Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
      We are not now that strength which in old days
      Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
      One equal temper of heroic hearts,
      Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
      To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Oscar Wilde – The Picture of Dorian Gray

  • Oscar Wilde will give a negative connotation to Pater’s theory by demonstrating that living to the brim brings one to self-debasement and corruption (The Picture of Dorian Gray - 1891).

  • Gerard Manley Hopkins

    • turned Pater’s Carpe Diem into a frenetically sensuous religious poetry (CARPE DEUM: feeling God completely, getting drunk with Him).

      My heart in hiding
      Stirred for a bird, —the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!
      Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
      Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
      Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

Renaissance influence

  • d/ The Renaissance turns man into a creator, a Titan who dares challenge God, sometimes playing God.

    • This perspective is reduced in Victorianism to the part the author plays as the creator of his world: the Victorian novelist becomes authoritarian, omniscient and very much in control of his characters and plot. He is the “God” of his book and the universe he creates represents a microcosm, a mirror of the world at large.
Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre

  • the author “governs” the reader, the same way the character Jane Eyre finally controls and governs Rochester, her blind husband.

    Reader, I married him. (…) Mr. Rochester continued blind the first two years of our union; perhaps it was that circumstance that drew us so very near—that knit us so very close: for I was then his vision, as I am still his right hand. Literally, I was (what he often called me) the apple of his eye. He saw nature--he saw books through me; and never did I weary of gazing for his behalf... (…) … he eventually recovered the sight of that one eye. He cannot now see very distinctly: he cannot read or write much; but he can find his way without being led by the hand: the sky is no longer a blank to him-- the earth no longer a void. When his first-born was put into his arms, he could see that the boy had inherited his own eyes, as they once were--large, brilliant, and black. On that occasion, he again, with a full heart, acknowledged that God had tempered judgment with mercy.
Thackeray, Dickens, Tennyson, Browning

  • William Makepeace Thackeray – Vanity Fair - At the end of Vanity Fair, the author, becomes the puppeteer that controlled the “play”, the show of his puppets - the characters:

    Ah! Vanitas Vanitatum! Which of is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied?—Come, children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out.

  • Charles Dickens - No matter the novel he writes, he knows everything & he is everywhere, he voices his own likes and dislikes, telling the reader what to think, what to conclude. His didacticism is obvious.

  • Browning, in My Last Duchess, and Tennyson, in Ulysses, use the dramatic monologue technique to hide their feelings by putting a mask between themselves and readers. The mask is the voice of a character who speaks to some interlocutor in the poem or directly addresses the readers in order to persuade them of something. In this way, by means of a character, the poet tries to control his interlocutors imposing his own piece of truth onto them.

Renaissance influence

  • e/ The loss of faith in God in the Late Renaissance (the 16th c) leads to the loss of faith & trust in Man, in his own power to master the world, control his destiny, play or challenge God.

    • feelings of melancholy, doubt, hesitation expressed in Pico della Mirandola’s and Leonardo da Vinci’s words that “Man is a God in ruins” ➔ He has godly aspirations but limited powers (drama of the limit).
    • In Victorianism, some authors seem to realise and distrust their power to master everything by means of point of view: they introduce two narrators that keep the distance from the fictional truth, each counterbalancing the other’s perspective.
      • In Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights the story of Heathcliff and Catherine is told by a servant, Nelly Dean, and a townsman, Mr. Lockwood.
      • Charles Dickens combines the omniscient point of view of his own voice with the very personal approach
Renaissance influence

  • f./ The Renaissance idea that “Man is in the centre” turns in the Victorian Age into “Woman can also be in the centre”.

    • For the first time, she finds the power to fight for her own rights as an equal to men in society. She becomes important and powerful as a creator (Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, Elizabeth Gaskell, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot). It is the beginning of gender studies.
    • The Bronte sisters and George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) write under male pennames, yet their female characters are often strong and interesting in knowledge and in influencing the world
    • Elizabeth Gaskell reveals the reality of industrial towns, religious fragmentation, scientific pursuits and country society while creating strong female protagonists
    • Elizabeth Barrett Browning runs away from her stifling upper middle class Victorian home to Italy – she elopes – her Aurora Leigh teaches the value of female independence and education
Renaissance influence

  • 2. The World as a Stage

    • The Renaissance people considered the whole world a stage on which men were actors interpreting a part given by a Director (God) in the theatre play of life. Drama represented the most important genre of the epoch. In the 19th c, they felt the need to dramatise the novel, poetry and even the essay.
      • a./ In the novel, there are sudden appearances and disappearances reminding one of the entrances and exits in plays (Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights)
      • b./ Mary and Charles Lamb change plays into novels: Tales From Shakespeare (1807)
      • c./ In poetry, we meet the dramatic monologue strategy by means of which poets comment on the epoch expressing their feelings, at the same time protecting themselves in a period that did not encourage outbursts of passion. In this way, they also challenged the reader to embark upon a dialogue and debate on the matter under discussion.
Renaissance influence

  • d./ In the essay, with some authors as Carlyle and Pater (to a certain extent), the reader comes across a strongly rhetoric style which reminds one of the drama.

    How a man, of some wide thing that he has witnessed, will construct a narrative, what kind of picture and delineation he will give of it,- is the best measure you could get of what intellect is in the man. Which circumstance is vital and shall stand prominent; which unessential, fit to be suppressed; where is the true beginning, the true sequence and ending? To find out this, you task the whole force of insight that is in the man. He must understand the thing; according to the depth of his understanding, will the fitness of his answer be. You will try him so. Does like join itself to like; does the spirit of method stir in that confusion, so that its embroilment becomes order? Can the man say, Fiat lux— Let there be light; and out of chaos make a world? Precisely as there is light in himself, will he accomplish this.
Renaissance influence

  • 3. William Shakespeare

    • The Victorians made use of Shakespeare’s plays since he was a point of reference in the English culture.

      • a./ They magnified and glorified the image of Shakespeare, because his creation gave power to the English nation. The culturally splendid past was again brought into the present in order to reinforce it.

        • In 1840, Thomas Carlyle wrote On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History.
        • In a chapter called The Hero as Poet, he (Carlyle) says that a nation can speak through the genius of a poet or a writer. Italy has Dante, England has Shakespeare who is the king that no Parliament, time or chance can dethrone.
        • Matthew Arnold has a poem named Shakespeare (1844), in which he highly praises the Renaissance playwright.

  • b./ The Victorians also reduced Shakespeare’s work to middle class and children’s understanding:

    • Mary, Charles Lamb (Tales From Shakespeare) - In 1811, Charles Lamb writes an essay On the Tragedies of Shakespeare in which he advises people that it is better to read Great Will’s plays than to see them enacted, because actors and directors destroy the essence of the plays.

  • Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, the fragment with the Victorian approach on Hamlet

Renaissance influence - Shakespeare

  • c./ In the previous century Voltaire called Shakespeare “a drunk Barbarian”. As if in a mirror, the 19th c George Bernard Shaw minimised Shakespeare by mocking at him in the play Caesar and Cleopatra.

  • d./ Shakespeare’s themes of mistreatment and abandonment were used both by poets and painters:

    • Browning’s poem Caliban upon Setebos offers the author the possibility to assume the voice of an enslaved character that meditates upon some God’s creation and upon the injustice of it.
    • Other examples: Mariana by Alfred Tennyson (influenced by the character Mariana from Measure for Measure).
    • In painting: Ophelia by John Everett Millais, Claudio and Isabella by William Holman Hunt, Mariana by John Everett Millais
Renaissance influence

  • 4. Renaissance Italy on the Theme of Art

    • Robert Browning on:
      • a./ painters: Andrea del Sarto, Fra Lippo Lippi
      • b./ musicians: A Toccato of Galuppi
      • c./ personalities: My Last Duchess, The Bishop Orders His Tomb ………I choose Never to stoop. Oh sir, she smiled, no doubt, Whene’er I passed her; but who passed without much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands; Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands As if alive. (from My last Duchess)