Men and Women
ty wheresoever in life it
chooses to turn the light of its gaze. So, also, in "Andrea del
Sarto," the easy cleverness of the unaspiring craftsman is not
embodied apart from the abject relationship which made his very soul
a bond- slave to the gross mandates of "the Cousin's whistle." Yet
in all three poems the biographic and historic conditions
contributing toward the individualizing of each artist are so
unobtrusively epitomized and vitally blended, that, while scarcely
any item of specific study of the art and artists of the Renaissance
would be out of place in illustrating the essential truth of the
portraiture and assisting in the better appreciation of the poem,
there is no detail of the workmanship which does not fall into the
background as a mere accessory to the dominant figure through whose
relationship to his art his station in the past is made clear.
This sort of dramatic synthesis of a salient, historical epoch is again strikingly disclosed in the following poem of the Renaissance period

