There is an old church in Rome named in honor of St. Praxed or Praxedes.
The Bishop's Tomb, however, "is entirely fictitious, although something
which is made to stand for it is now shown to credulous sightseers."
(Mrs. Orr, _Handbook to Robert Browning's Works_, p. 247.)
Ruskin says of this poem: "Robert Browning is unerring in every sentence
he writes of the Middle Ages--always vital, right, and profound, so
that in the matter of art, with which we are specially concerned, there
is hardly a principle connected with the medieval temper that he has not
struck upon in these seemingly careless and too rugged lines of his....
I know no other piece of modern English prose or poetry in which there
is so much told, as in these lines, of the Renaissance spirit--its
worldliness, inconsistency, pride, hypocrisy, ignorance of itself, love
of art, of luxury, and of good Latin. It is nearly all that I have said
of the central Renaissance, in thirty pages of 'The Stones of Venice,'
put into as many lines, Browning's also being the antecedent work."
(_Modern Painters_, Vol. iv, pp. 337-9.) "It was inevitable that the
great period of the Renaissance should produce men of the type of the
Bishop of St. Praxed; it would be grossly unfair to set him down as the
type of the churchmen of his time." Berdoe, _Browning Cyclopædia_, p.
81.
1. _Vanity, saith the preacher, vanity._ Cf. ll. 8-9, 51-52, as
illustrative of the religious professionalism of the Bishop's talk. He
drops into the ecclesiastical conception of life and death, and into the
phraseology of his order.
21. _Epistle-side._ The right-hand side facing the altar, where the
epistle is read by the priest acting as celebrant, the gospel being read
from the other side by the priest acting as assistant.
29. _Peach-blossom marble._ This rosy marble delights the Bishop as much
as the pale cheap onion-stone offends him. The lapis-lazuli, a rich blue
stone (l. 42), the antique-black (Nero-antico), a rare black marble (l.
34), the beautiful green jasper (l. 68), the elaborate carving planned
for the bronze frieze (l. 56-62, 106-111), show not only that the Bishop
covets what is costly, but that his highly cultivated taste knows real
beauty.
34. _That conflagration._ The eagerness of the Bishop for the lump of
the lapis-lazuli has made him steal even from his own church.