Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or…

“Andrea del Sarto” is a dramatic monologue: the Florentine painter speaks one evening to his wife Lucrezia, whom he asks to sit with him a while. He knows his own hand is faultless, “Well, less is more, Lucrezia!”, yet other painters, whose work is technically poorer, reach “a heaven that’s shut to me”. He is unmoved by praise or blame, and this very calm is his failure. The line answers an imaginary objection: what does it matter if an outline is wrongly traced? Then he looks at his own silver-grey perfection, “the worse!”, and thinks of the young Raphael, “The Urbinate who died five years ago”. Lucrezia, meanwhile, is waiting for her “cousin”, and Andrea will give her money for the man’s debts.

Browning drew the story from Vasari’s Lives of the painters and published the poem in Men and Women in 1855, while living in Florence with Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

The line is now quoted as a call to aim beyond one’s powers, without its irony: the speaker is a man who never did.

Andrea del Sarto (Men and Women), 1855

Checked word for word in the work itself.

Read the passage in the work