Men and Women

“The Bishop orders his Tomb” This half-delirious pleading of the dying prelate for a tomb which shall gratify his luxurious artistic tastes and personal rivalries, presents dramatically not merely the special scene of the worldly old bishop’s petulant struggle against his failing power, and his collapse, finally, beneath the will of his so-called nephews, it also illustrates a characteristic gross form of the Renaissance spirit encumbered with Pagan survivals, fleshly appetites, and selfish monopolizings which hampered its development.—­ “It is nearly all that I said of the Central Renaissance—­its worldliness, inconsistency, pride, hypocrisy, ignorance of itself, love of art, of luxury, and of good Latin—­in thirty pages of the ‘Stones of Venice,’ put into as many lines, Browning’s being also the antecedent work” (Ruskin).  The Church of St.Praxed is notable for the beauty of its stone-work and mosaics, one of its chapels being so extraordinarily rich that it was called Orto del Paradiso, or the Garden of Paradise; and so, although the bishop and his tomb there are imaginary, it supplies an appropriate setting for the poetic scene.

1.  Vanity, saith the preacher:  Ecclesiastes 1.2.

21.  Epistle-side:  the right-hand side facing the altar, where the epistle is read by the priest acting as celebrant, the gospel being read from the other side by the priest acting as assistant.

25.  Basalt:  trap-rock, leaden or black in color.

31.  Onion stone:  for the Italian cipollino, a kind of greenish-white marble splitting into coats like an onion, cipolla; hence so called.

41.  Olive-frail:  a basket made of rushes, used for packing olives.

42.  Lapis lazuli:  a bright blue stone.

46.  Frascati:  near Rome, on the Alban hills.

48.  God the Father’s globe:  in the group of the Trinity adorning the altar of Saint Ignatius at the church of Il Gesu in Rome.

51.  Weaver’s shuttle:  Job 7.6.

54.  Antique-black:  Nero antico.  Browning gives the English equivalent for the name of this stone.

58.  Tripod:  the seat with three feet on which the priestess of Apollo sat to prophesy, an emblem of the Delphic oracle.

Thyrsus:  the ivy-coiled staffer spear stuck in a pine-cone, symbol of Bacchic orgy.  These, with the other Pagan tokens and pictures, mingle oddly but significantly with the references to the Saviour, Saint Praxed, and Moses.  See also line 92, where Saint Praxed is confused with the Saviour, in the mind of the dying priest.  Saint Praxed, the virgin daughter of a Roman Senator and friend of Saint Paul, in whose honor the Bishop’s Church is named, is again brought forward in lines 73-75 in a queer capacity which pointedly illustrates the speaker and his time.

66.  Travertine:  see note “Pictor Ignotus,” 67.

68. jasper:  a dark green stone with blood-red spots, susceptible of high polish.

77.  Tully’s:  Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-46 B. C.).

79.  Ulpian:  a Roman jurist (170-228 A. D.), belonging to the degenerate age of Roman literature.

99. Elucescebat:  he was illustrious; formed from elucesco, an inceptive verb from eluceo:  in post classic Latin.

102.  Else I give the Pope my villas:  perhaps a threat founded on the custom of Julius II and other popes, according to Burckhardt, of enlarging their power “by making themselves heirs of the cardinals and clergy . . .  Hence the splendor of tile tombs of the prelates . . . a part of the plunder being in this way saved from the hands of the Pope.”

108.  A vizor and a Term:  a mask, and a bust springing from a square pillar, representing the Roman god Terminus, who presided over boundaries.