The Faultless Painter
Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for? All is silver-grey, Placid and perfect with my art: the worse! I know both what I want and what might gain, And yet how profitless to know, to sigh "Had I been two, another and myself, Our head would have o'erlooked the world!" No doubt. Yonder's a work now, of that famous youth The Urbinate who died five years ago. ('Tis copied, George Vasari sent it me.) Well, I can fancy how he did it all, Pouring his soul, with kings and popes to see, Reaching, that heaven might so replenish him, Above and through his art—for it gives way; That arm is wrongly put—and there again— A fault to pardon in the drawing's lines, Its body, so to speak: its soul is right, He means right—that, a child may understand. Still, what an arm! and I could alter it: But all the play, the insight and the stretch— Out of me, out of me! And wherefore out?
, Andrea del Sarto (Men and Women) (1855)
Browning’s dramatic monologue gives voice to Andrea del Sarto, the Renaissance painter whose technique was so flawless that Vasari named him “il pittore senza errori.” In these lines from the longer poem, Andrea studies a copy of a work by Raphael and arrives at a confession that still stings: he can see the anatomical errors, knows he could correct them, but recognizes that something essential lives in Raphael’s painting that his own perfection cannot touch. “Its body, so to speak: its soul is right.”
The distinction Andrea draws is not between good work and bad. It falls between work that is technically correct and work that is alive. Raphael’s arm is “wrongly put,” but it was put there in an act of reaching, of “play, insight and stretch” that Andrea cannot replicate precisely because his hand never falters. The flaw is evidence of ambition that outran control. And Andrea’s anguished cry, “Out of me, out of me!” admits that this quality cannot be summoned through skill alone. It comes from somewhere his mastery has no access to. The perfection is the problem: “Placid and perfect with my art: the worse!”
We find ourselves in an era when faultless execution is becoming abundant, when surfaces can be polished to a gleam Andrea might have envied. Browning’s poem, written more than 160 years ago, already knew something about the poverty of flawlessness: that there is a kind of wrongness which signals life, a reaching past what the hand can manage that leaves traces of the attempt in the finished work. Andrea could alter Raphael’s arm. Whether the alteration would be an improvement or a loss is a question that has not gotten simpler with time. Perhaps it has only become more urgent, now that the capacity to correct, to smooth, to perfect is so widely and cheaply available. What we do with that capacity depends on whether we believe the reaching matters as much as the result.