Editor’s Note: For now over 75 years, Baylor Line has been publishing vivid storytelling from across the Baylor Family. I don’t think our archives full of deep, inspirational features should live solely on shelves, so we are bringing them back to like in BL Classics. This piece from our January-February 1962 edition chronicles the donation of seven paintings, some of the oldest still found in the Armstrong Browning Library.
On the seventy-first anniversary of the death of Robert Browning, Baylor University accepted five paintings for the Armstrong Browning Library’s art collection in tribute to the poet. Donor of the paintings was the Samuel H. Kress Foundation of New York.
Two additional paintings were given to the Browning collection by Robert Manning, formerly of the Kress Foundation. They are St. James the Greater by Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, more frequently called Guercino, and Charity by the same artist, who lived from 1591 to 1666.
Guercino painted The Guardian Angel, which inspired Browning’s poem of the same name. William Lyon Phelps, like Baylor’s late Dr. A. J. Armstrong one of the nation’s most beloved Browning scholars, saw the painting and had it copied. After Dr. Phelps’s death, his family presented the copy of The Guardian Angel to the Armstrong Browning Library.
The idea occurred to Dr. Armstrong to call a group of Friends of the Library its Guardian Angels. This name has persisted for some twenty years, and it is this group which each year on December 12 commemorates the poet in an anniversary tribute.
Browning’s love of the art of the Renaissance carried him on a fascinating trail among the churches of Italy, where most of the fascinating art of that period was expressed. He lived in Florence for many years, roaming its winding, narrow streets, seeking in the little churches and the great, their paintings. He found many paintings which he managed to purchase. When his effects were sold in the famous Sotheby auction of 1913, along with those of his son, Robert Wiedemann Barrett Browning, there were not only books, but oil paintings, drawings, prints, manuscripts, furniture, tapestries, and other works of art. A few outstanding items from this sale which are now in Baylor’s Browning collection include A Madonna by Murillo; the first likeness, 1835 (a silver-copper daguerreotype) of the poet; the last oil portrait of the poet by his artist son, 1889; William Page’s famous portrait of the poet; a fine bronze plaque in relief of Aeschylus by Guidi; a portrait of Pen playing the piano by Fanny Haworth; and three oil paintings of the Sienese school: St. Sebastian, Two Saints, and a Madonna.
The Samuel H. Kress Foundation follows a unique plan. It does not sell but gives its art where it finds a worthy home. Its treasures may be found in museums, art galleries, and universities throughout the country.
Oldest of the paintings given to the Browning collection is Madonna and Child, attributed to Pietro Lorenzetti or a follower in the Sienese school 1280-1348. It is pictured above, one of the most valuable paintings in the group, ranking in its evaluation by art critics in the class of Zucarelli’s Landscape, shown on the next page.
Next in age is the painting of the opposite page, Andrea del Sarto’s Madonna and Child between St. John the Baptist and Three Angels. The contemporary of Raphael and Correggio, Andrea del Sarto lived from 1487 to 1530. He was called “the faultless painter,” because of his meticulous attention to detail, at the cost of inspiration and originality in his works; however, he still ranks among the famous ones of the Tuscan school and as one of the greatest masters the world had yet seen. Even today, art galleries in Europe place frequent stars at his name in their catalogs.
Christ, the Man of Sorrows, pictured on the next page, was painted by Giampietrino (Giovanni Pedrini), a student and foremost of the disciples of Leonardo da Vinci. A painter of the Milanese School, he lived 1520-40. His painting is known for its painstaking and delicate chioscuro (light and dark), showing the influence of da Vinci and of Flemish painting.
