Exegi monumentum aere perennius.… non omnis moriar. From Horace onward, the relationship of art to human mortality has been a major theme in literature – and one which obviously interested Browning, if we may judge from some striking variations he worked on it. In “Cleon” and “Abt Vogler,” for example, his speakers address the subject from very different points of view: Cleon, the pagan, argues that the fact his art will survive after his death cannot in any meaningful way confer immortality on him and that, as an artist, he even more than others is painfully aware of his own limited life; Abt Vogler, on the other hand, confident of the changelessness of God's good, sees in his art a promise that both he and his improvisation will endure. Given Browning's penchant for pushing ideas to extremes and turning them in unusual directions, it is not surprising that he would treat the topic in other less predictable ways – as he did, for example, by making the inert changelessness of works of art in “The Statue and the Bust” comment ironically on human failure to act, or by endowing the worldly and sensuous Bishop at St. Praxed's with an appropriately literal faith in the kind of immortality a suitably artful tomb would confer upon him. It is not surprising, then, that similar topics would appear in “A Toccata of Galuppi's.”
The relationship between atmospheric condition and human mortality associated with coarse material particulate in Bogotá (Colombia)
