Victorian Poetry

Victorian poetry and historicism

effigy for future generations, the Bishop remains blithely unaware of all
that his funerary monument will signify about the High Renaissance for
future generations. Ruskin counted among the noted Victorian critics who
appreciated the economy with which this poem portrayed "the Renaissance
spirit, - its worldliness, inconsistency, pride, hypocrisy, ignorance of itself,
love of art, of luxury, and of good Latin." "It is," Ruskin added, "nearly all
that I said of the central Renaissance in thirty pages of The Stones of
Venice [1851-53] put into as many lines." 40 Browning depicts the Bishop
trying to bribe and cajole his illegitimate sons into building him a splendid
tabernacle in which he imagines himself reclining, with a huge lump of
lapis lazuli between his knees, surrounded by nine columns of "Peach-
blossom" marble (29), and with antique-black basalt for his slab. "How
else," declares the Bishop, "Shall ye contrast my frieze to come beneath?"
(54-55). As his imagination runs wild, he imagines this "frieze" featuring
"some tripod, thyrsus, with a vase or so" (58), a picture of Jesus Christ
preaching "his sermon on the mount" (59), and "one Pan, / Ready to twitch
the Nymph's last garment off" (60-61). The tasteless jumble of materials
in this riotous display of conspicuous consumption signifies for Ruskin the
aesthetic, moral, and spiritual disorder of the High Renaissance. Above all,
it is through such material objects as the Bishop's tomb that "the Renais-
sance spirit" can be accessed.

V

By contrast with such a monstrous spectacle of cultural incoherence as the
Bishop's tomb, the Middle Ages represented for Ruskin what Alice
Chandler has aptly termed "a dream of order." 41 Ruskin's medievalism
draws on a view of the Middle Ages that developed during the eighteenth
century, a view that emphasized its naturalism, its social stability under
feudalism, its faith, and most of all its organic cultural unity. But the
Victorians' approach to the Middle Ages was neither more singular nor
more unified than their perception of Ancient Greece or Renaissance Italy.
If for some writers the Middle Ages connoted Roman Catholicism (and,
depending on a writer's viewpoint, this connection with Rome could be a
good or a bad thing), then for others it signified a characteristic Englishness.
Where Tories associated medievalism with the old feudal values, socialists
believed it represented the pre-capitalist laboring classes and the Guilds.
While some poets discovered the Middle Ages through Thomas Malory's
Le Morte Darthur (1485), others found them in the works of Geoffrey
Chaucer, in the early Italian paintings by artists such as Giotto and
Cimabue, and in the gargoyles and arches of a Gothic cathedral.

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