Dared and Done

by Julia Markus

  PALAZZO BARBERINI, ROME. The grand piano nobile of this imposing mansion was the home of W.W. Story and his family for most of their years in Rome. The Storys were a hub of the expatriate British and American artistic community, often holding amateur theatricals for their children in which Browning took part.

  To view nudes in the mid-nineteenth century was aesthetically sophisticated and morally advanced. Elizabeth would tease Wilson, who was so shocked by the nudity of the classical statues in the Uffizi Gallery that she could not stay. Barrett Browning was advanced. When she looked at the Greek Slave in Power’s studio she saw it as “white thunder,” an appeal against white slavery as earnest and intense as her appeal against black slavery in “The Runaway Slave.” Its nudity was divine.

  She was no John Ruskin. That Victorian art critic and friend of hers extolled white marble, but ran from his marriage bed, shocked by what he saw when a real woman disrobed. In fact, his wife had to get a doctor’s report in retaliation. There was nothing wrong with her body—except it wasn’t bald marble.

  THE GREEK SLAVE by Hiram Powers (1805–73) was created by the American stonecutter in 1838, a year after he settled in Florence. The statue was exhibited on a revolving pedestal at the 1851 Great International Exhibition at the Crystal Palace in London to universal acclaim. EBB had first seen the work when she arrived in Florence in 1847 and immediately wrote a poem on its power as an antislavery manifesto. In her sonnet, “Hiram Powers’ ‘Greek Slave,’ ” she may have set the tone for viewing this neoclassical nude as clothed in virtue.

  The sensuality of nudity, mortal love between two naked lovers, would be portrayed by Barrett Browning in Aurora Leigh. For her, Hiram Powers’s work must have incorporated a harmony between freedom in art and politics, between the naked and the ideal, that she could not only look at unabashedly, but could champion. The statue was “passionless perfection.” In America, far from the classical tradition of a headless and armless past, this statue went on tour. People paid to take a look at the naked woman in chains. Were they staring at “Art’s fiery finger,” attempting to break up “the serfdom of this world?”

  Appeal fair stone,

  From God’s pure heights of beauty against man’s wrong!

  Catch up in thy divine face, not alone,

  East griefs but west, and strike and shame the strong,

  By thunders of white silence, overthrown.

  For Elizabeth, Powers’s work was full of revolutionary force. No less, in Rome, in the mid-fifties, one saw example after example of white silence, nudes or partially draped classical figures, that retold the old stories and pointed to the ideal.

  There was a painter in this group of American stonecutters who would be portrayed in one of Browning’s greatest monologues. He was the Brownings’ downstairs neighbor in Rome, William Page, called in his day the American Titian. Roman society was so lively that Robert began, at his wife’s urging, to go out at night. Elizabeth herself went to a few soirees, but generally she stayed at home. Sometimes the painter William Page would come upstairs and they’d talk about spiritualism, which interested them both. His second wife, Sarah Page, did not join them. She was, during those evenings, pursuing her own interests.

  Page was a middle-aged man, balding, bearded, serious. A rather lean man, full of enthusiasm about the nature of art. But he had a weary look. He and Robert Browning became extremely good friends. Both loved to theorize about the arts. And Page had such ideas, such theories. He staked his art on them. He believed that the great Venetian painter and colorist Titian had intentionally rendered his subjects in subdued grayish tones. Those portraits of princes, those flesh tones of his sumptuous nudes, were all meant to be in “twilight” colors. He did not believe that time had discolored them, that age caused the varnish on top of them to darken. The mid tone of gray was the universal color, and Titian had known it. In accordance with his theory, Page, the American Titian, underpainted.

  In the spring of 1854, Robert Browning sat for his portrait at a pivotal point of the painter’s life, and at a time when he had just discovered another theory—a new scientific way of measuring the proportions of the human body. Page was inspired by a favorite authority of the Swedenborgians, the Book of Revelation. Twenty-five years later he would remember that in reading Revelation, a remarkable statement struck him that helped him to figure out proportion in his paintings: “ ‘And he measured the wall thereof, an hundred and forty and four cubits, according to the measure of a man, that is, of the angel.’ ”

  The idea of a mathematical formula divined from Revelation which would give a standard for the modeling of any human figure appealed to the Anglo-American community of artists and writers living in Rome at the time. “At an early day I told my countryman, Mr. W. W. Story, the sculptor and author, of the hints I had gathered from St. John and the use I had made of them.”

  Years later, Browning would encourage Page to publish his discoveries on human proportion in an English journal, and he helped Page to remember when he had first made the observations. It must have been before 1855, because Browning used them in his poem “Cleon,” published in Men and Women:

  I know the true proportions of a man

  And women also, not observed before.

  And Elizabeth had put them in her novel in verse, Aurora Leigh.

  Erect, sublime—the measure of a man

  And that’s the measure of an angel, says

  The Apostle.

  Browning steered away from telling Page he had used imagery from that discovery in another poem in his collection. In “Andrea del Sarto: Called ‘The Faultless Painter’ ” he mentioned

  Four great walls in the New Jerusalem

  Meted on each side by the angel’s reed

  In that poem, another theory of Page appeared as well:

  You smile? why there’s my picture ready made,

  That’s what we painters call our harmony!

  A common greyness silvers everything,—

  All in a twilight, you and I alike.

  Andrea del Sarto, the Renaissance painter, sits near the window of his studio as daylight wanes and speaks to his silent and unfaithful wife. His whole life is autumn, all “a twilight piece.”

  My youth, my hope, my art, being all toned down

  To yonder sober pleasant Fiesole.

  Most of the details of this poem, which scholars have attributed to the poet’s reading about the life of the Italian painter, do not come from history. Del Sarto’s life masked William Page’s. Both painters had beautiful and difficult wives who also served as models. Del Sarto’s Lucrezia was greedy and domineering. She wasn’t the moonfaced, silent, serpentine woman who appears in Browning’s poem, although she was, as was Page’s second wife, an extremely beautiful young woman married to a middle-aged painter.

  Browning veered from del Sarto’s life by giving the Lucrezia in his poem a lover, a “cousin” who had gambling debts. Browning’s Lucrezia regarded her husband’s art as a means of paying off these debts. Her past lovers were legion:

  My face, my moon, my everybody’s moon,

  Which everybody looks on and calls his,

  And, I suppose, is looked on by in turn,

  While she looks—

  One remembers the Duke in Browning’s “My Last Duchess,” saying of his wife, “she liked whate’er / She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.” And one recalls as well the moonfaced beauty, hair parted in the middle and away from the face, in Page’s portrait of his second wife.

  SARAH DOUGHERTY PAGE (CA. 1849) by William Page. The second wife of the American painter. She did not share her older husband’s intellectual and artistic interests, causing much gossip in the American expatriate community in Italy, and eventually ran away with a young Neapolitan nobleman. “Page and Cirella, a man and a wisp of straw,” wrote RB, who loved and respected the painter. Sarah became the real-life model for Lucrezia in RB’s “Andrea del Sarto.”

  SELF-PORTRAIT (1860–61) by William
Page, who was called the American Titian in his day. Page was a close friend of RB—his theories about art greatly interested the poet—and of EBB, with whom he shared a belief in Swedenborg. As RB sat for his portrait by Page in Rome in 1854, he was a daily witness to Sarah Page’s affair with Don Alfonso Cirella.

  Sarah Page was quite promiscuous. James Russell Lowell subleased the Brownings’ apartment in the Casa Guidi during the winter of 1851–52 while the Brownings were in Paris and the Pages were in Florence. Lowell had witnessed Sarah’s behavior. Her flirtations with the Austrian officers and her attentions to a Captain Neuhauser, “who used to play chess with Page,” caused so much gossip among the Anglo-Florentines that the Pages moved to Rome. Page’s wife never called him away from France as Andrea’s wife did, but she certainly caused him to leave Florence. Lowell was a very good friend of his countryman W. W. Story and kept him informed. And Browning became a daily witness to the disrupting marriage while he sat for his portrait.

  Only after its completion did Browning tell W. W. Story of the portrait: “I hate keeping secrets—but this was Page’s, not mine—he even wished my wife to be kept in ignorance of it—which, of course, was impossible.” During the sittings Browning could not help but see the open relationship Page’s wife was having with an Italian friend of Story’s, Don Alfonso Cirella, son of the Neapolitan Duke of Cirella. He was “a handsome spirited young fellow of about 21 years of age,” according to Story’s letter to James Russell Lowell. For a year Sarah had been with Cirella in the most open way. “He was at her house morning noon & night, & in the constant habit of dining with the family. I do not know how Page could be ignorant of their liaison, which formed the topic of gossip in American & Italian circles” during the season in which the Brownings were Page’s upstairs neighbors.

  In Browning’s poem, Andrea is in his studio, his model and wife sits with him, and the twilight harmony is pierced by her lover’s (cousin’s) whistle. Between March and May 1854, Browning sat fifty-four times for his portrait, never for less than an hour and a half, and generally for two hours. During that time Sarah and Cirella were in and about, conducting their affair in the most open manner. The situation was much more blatant than in the poem, where adultery was suggested by a “cousin’s” off-stage whistle. Life, like a Page portrait, had to be toned down.

  Browning witnessed his friend, with his noble mind—“noble” is the adjective most applied to Page—passively accepting his wife’s betrayal. Still, Browning as well as Story could say of Sarah Page: “she was kind & good & affectionate to us & to our child and we kept it in mind!” As well they might. It was Sarah Page who opened her doors to little Edith when Joe died of gastric fever, and nursed Edith and her own child when both came down with the same disease. Elizabeth, too, noted a specific kindness to Penini in March 1854—on his fifth birthday: “Mrs. Page, the wife of the distinguished American artist, gave a party in honour of him the other day. There was an immense cake inscribed ‘Penini’ in sugar; and he sat at the head of the table and did the honours.”

  Sarah Page’s temperament differed from the shrewish Lucrezia whom del Sarto married. Lucrezia scared her husband’s students away with her sharp tongue. Hardly the quiet Lucrezia of Browning’s poem, which cleverly began with a disclaimer: “But do not let us quarrel any more.” And what Browning’s Andrea accused his wife of was not willfulness but utter indifference to his art. His tone builds to an irritability that almost jumps out of the poem:

  But had you—oh, with the same perfect brow,

  And perfect eyes, and more than perfect mouth,

  And the low voice my soul hears, as a bird

  The fowler’s pipe, and follows to the snare—

  Had you, with these the same, but brought a mind!

  Some women do so.

  Such a woman, a woman of intellect, would urge her artist-husband to live for:

  ‘God and the glory! never care for gain.

  ‘The present by the future, what is that?’

  But not everyone can be married to Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

  The Brownings left Rome that summer and would not winter there again until 1858, but they maintained the closest ties with the Storys and with Page. That summer Don Cirella was at Albano, where Page leased a house for Sarah and the daughters while he remained in Rome. Story wrote to Lowell, “a most admirable arrangement for the two lovers & a most unfortunate one for the husband.” When they returned, Cirella went home to Naples, and in December, “Sarah procured a passport … said to Page, that she was going to Albano & disappeared.” Because of difficulties with the passport, she had to return to Rome, which she did, using a false name and taking her own place, where she waited for a visa to Naples. Page found out she was in town, rushed to her, and begged her to return. She was very determined and did not listen to any of his arguments. In a day or two she disappeared again, to join Cirella in Albano.

  Story told Lowell, “It is mere madness on her part—he is nine years younger than she—and will assuredly cast her off at some time. I do not in the least think that he was the seducing party. She fell in love with him—and led him on from step to step.” Sarah was “determined to leave Page with some one or other (as I know) and had made overtures to other persons, at least to one other person … and there are tales of her which are the worst that can be told of woman. I hope they are not true.” And, as in Browning’s poem, there were rumors that “she has left considerable debts behind her.”

  Browning wrote to the Storys in December, “our greatest misfortune being in this sad business of the Pages … I fear Page is left deeply involved in debts of her contracting.” Not hearing from Page, Browning wrote to him in the middle of January 1855. The heartfelt sympathy the poet felt for his friend was one that would translate itself into the more objective world of poetry: “This is only a word for my own sake—don’t think it wants or needs answer of any kind.” He just wanted to assure his friend “of my constant remembrance and affection.” And tactfully, “I have heard very little about you, but fear you are harassed & out of health. How little we can do for each other in such conjunctures! Let me say what I feel, & understand why I say it. I have turned over in my mind the probabilities & prudence of a run up to Rome, just that I might see you—but it can hardly be. At the same time, I am not in apprehension as I should be did I know you less. No more is laid on any of us than he can bear. You must be an example to weaker men: and what gifts you have, and will ever have! I shall write no more now, out of the fulness of heart, this word would come, as I said. God bless you dear Page!”

  A difficult letter to write. More difficult still was that the rupture in Page’s life imitated a rupture in his art. A year before Sarah ran off, Elizabeth wrote to Anna Jameson from Rome of the wonderful portrait Page had just completed of their mutual friend, the actress Charlotte Cushman. It is “soul and body together.” However, “Critics wonder whether the colour will stand. It is a theory of this artist that time does not tone, and that Titian’s pictures were painted as we see them. The consequence of which is that his (Page’s) pictures are undertoned in the first instance, and if they change at all will turn black.”

  ROBERT BROWNING (1854) by William Page. Page sent his portrait to RB, but by the time it arrived in Florence, it had cracked and faded. Browning wrote, “We love you and your art the more as we look at it the more—I can say for my wife and myself” (September 9, 1854). Still, he sent the portrait back to Page for repair. Its ghostlike quality has survived subsequent attempts to restore it.

  When Browning’s portrait was completed, Page made another of his noble gestures: He presented it as a gift to Elizabeth. He “painted a picture of Robert like Titian then like a prince presented it to me.” Robert wrote of it to W. W. Story, whose sculpture he never praised as extravagantly, that it was “the wonder of everybody—no such work has been achieved in our time, to my knowledge, at least. I am not qualified to speak of the likeness, understand—only of the life and effect, whic
h, I wish, with all my heart, had been given to my wife’s head, or any I like better to look at than my own.”

  He wouldn’t have to look for long. In September he sent his portrait from Florence to Rome to have a crack repaired. By May 1855 the portrait was much lighter, the crack hadn’t reappeared, and Browning was keeping it in the sun. He planned to take it with him to London and Paris. However, by October 29, 1855, he wrote to Dante Gabriel Rossetti: “I have taken you at your word—you will receive my portrait forthwith. You must put it in the sun, for I seem to fear it will come but blackly out of its three months’ case-hardening. So it fares with Page’s pictures … ‘Kings do not die—they only disappear.’ ”

  Ironically, the portrait that would begin to darken within a year of its completion had almost immediately cracked. A short time after Browning sat in Page’s studio and witnessed Page’s marriage disintegrating, he became the observer of Page’s painting disintegrating as well. In the next century, after having been cleaned in 1949, the portrait once more turned black. Its ghostly appearance must have affected Browning. It offered a painful parallel to Page’s life.

  At evening tea with Mrs. Kinney, Browning might impatiently insist that there was no relation between George Sand’s morality and her art. In a poem he wrote a few years later, Andrea del Sarto’s perfect technique was an artistic fault that was related to a moral fault. Del Sarto’s obsession with style impeded him from striving for meaning in art and also allowed him to succumb to his wife and to become morally culpable in his dealing with the French king. But the flaws in Page’s life and his art sprang from a noble and more generous nature. Such “faults” must have perplexed and worried Robert Browning. Why was dear noble Page so afflicted in life and in art? The impetus for the poem itself, one of Browning’s greatest, came out of the poet’s attempt to make some order—some sense—out of this painful and unanswerable question. One thing was sure. Both del Sarto and Page would have risen higher in their art if their wives’ beauty had extended to their souls.