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Title: Children of the old masters
(Italian school)
Author: Alice Meynell
Release date: February 15, 2026 [eBook #77937]
Language: English
Original publication: London: Duckworth and co, 1903
Credits: Richard Tonsing and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CHILDREN OF THE OLD MASTERS ***
CHILDREN
OF THE
OLD MASTERS
_All rights reserved._
[Illustration:
_Filippino Lippi. Pinx._ _Walker & Cockerell Ph. Sc._
_Sacred Family._
]
CHILDREN
OF THE
OLD MASTERS
(ITALIAN SCHOOL)
BY
ALICE MEYNELL
[Illustration: Decorative printer’s device showing a stylized flowering
tree with intertwined branches and foliage, framed by ornamental leaves,
above a scroll bearing the motto DESORMAIS.]
LONDON
DUCKWORTH AND CO.
3, HENRIETTA STREET
COVENT GARDEN, W.C.
1903
CHISWICK PRESS: CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND CO.
TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE, LONDON.
TO
THE PLAYMATES
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTORY 1
THE CHILD OF EARLY ART 11
TUSCAN SCULPTURE AND ENAMEL 17
THE FLORENTINE PAINTERS—I. 26
THE FLORENTINE PAINTERS—II. 37
PORTRAITS 48
SIENA AND UMBRIA AND OUTLYING SCHOOLS 56
RAPHAEL AND AFTER 66
THE VENETIANS 73
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
FILIPPINO LIPPI _Frontispiece_
GIOVANNI BELLINI. Madonna and Child 4
DONATELLO. Head of a Child 6
SCHOOL OF DONATELLO. Angels 17
DONATELLO. Winged Putti 17
DONATELLO. The Young St. John 17
DONATELLO. Head of a Child 18
JACOPO DELLA QUERCIA. Madonna and Child 18
LUCA DELLA ROBBIA. Sketch for a panel of the Singing
Gallery 18
LUCA DELLA ROBBIA. Panel of the Singing Gallery 18
LUCA DELLA ROBBIA. Child with Flowers and Fruit 20
LUCA DELLA ROBBIA. Child with Flowers and Fruit 20
JACOPO DELLA QUERCIA. Madonna and Child 22
ROSSELLINO. Madonna and Child 22
BENEDETTO DA MAIANO. Madonna and Child 22
VERROCCHIO. Madonna and Child 22
ANDREA DELLA ROBBIA. Head of a Child 24
BENOZZO GOZZOLI. St. Sebastian 26
BENOZZO GOZZOLI. St. Augustine at School 28
BENOZZO GOZZOLI. St. Augustine at School 28
FRA ANGELICO. St. Laurence giving Alms 30
BOTTICELLI. From the “Story of Moses” 32
BOTTICELLI. Madonna and Child 34
BOTTICELLI. Boy with a Snake 36
GHIRLANDAJO. Old Man and Child 38
ANDREA VERROCCHIO AND LEONARDO. Angels 40
FILIPPINO LIPPI. From a painting of the Holy Family 42
LORENZO DI CREDI. Madonna and Child with Angels 42
ROSSO. Angels 44
ROSSO. Angel playing the lute 46
FRA BARTOLOMMEO. Angel playing the lute 46
ANDREA MANTEGNA. Family of Lodovico Gonzaga 48
TITIAN. Portrait 50
TIBERIO TITI. Infant Prince Leopoldo 52
TITIAN. Children of Charles V. 52
BAROCCIO. Infant Prince Federigo 54
PARIS BORDONE. Portrait 54
PIETRO LORENZETTI. Madonna and Child 56
MATTEO DI GIOVANNI. Madonna and Child with Angels 58
LUCA SIGNORELLI. The Coronation of St. Cecilia 58
PINTURICCHIO. St. John Preaching 60
PINTURICCHIO. The Child Jesus and the little St. John 62
PERUGINO. Madonna and Child, with the little St. John
and Angel 64
ANDREA MANTEGNA. Cherubs 66
RAPHAEL. Angel (from the fresco of the Four Sibyls) 68
RAPHAEL. Angels (“Madonna di S. Sisto”) 70
RAPHAEL. Madonna “with the gold finch,” Christ, and
Infant St. John 70
GIOVANNI BELLINI. Angel playing the flute 73
GIOVANNI BELLINI. Altar-piece of S. Giobbe 74
GIOVANNI BELLINI. Madonna and Child 74
ALVISE VIVARINI (formerly attributed to Bellini). Angel 74
GIOVANNI BELLINI. An Allegory 76
CARPACCIO. “The Presentation” (detail) 76
TITIAN. The Garden of the Loves 78
TITIAN. The Presentation in the Temple 80
TINTORETTO. The Presentation in the Temple 80
_The Photogravure Plates in this book are by Messrs. Walker and
Cockerell, after photographs by Edmund Houghton and the Fratelli
Alinari. The other reproductions are by Messrs. Waddington._
CHILDREN OF THE OLD MASTERS
INTRODUCTORY NOTE
The making of images was, in an earlier world, so well understood to be
for the sake of honour, that it was the act of homage which must needs
be, by law, restrained. The picture, the statue, the doll are likenesses
of things admired, and although a strange concourse of unchildlike
children face us as we look at the pictures of the Masters, we are
constrained to confess—seeing how his image is repeated—that these
Masters admired a child, and that the populace of their centuries must
have had popular admiration for a child.
It has been left chiefly for our day, and for our populace, to make an
image in irony, to clothe it in burlesque, to carry it in the procession
of insult. There is but one day in the year on which the people, in
London, make an image, and they set it up for the sake of derision, draw
it through a November fog, hoot it at the pauses of procession, and, at
the end of a day of contempt, give it to the flames. It is an act of
idolatry _à rebours_, an inversion of the admiring motive of human art,
an act of delight in disrespect not only towards something unworshipful
on earth, but towards the work of the maker’s own hands, to which the
old and general art of caricature has no real likeness. For there is no
ritual about the comic paper; nor is its illustration the work of the
people, leaving for a day their labour of making or carrying merchandise
to make and carry a work of art. Whereas they do deride the November
image with a kind of song, and it is the thing of their invention, their
burden, their own, thought out and put together and prepared to its
unhandsome end.
Thus the townspeople of to-day intend to tell us that they contemn—if
contempt is the word—the notorious man, national enemy, or what not, and
their own image of him. They do not express by means of an image what
the makers love, like, or admire. But the images carried by the people
of Europe in the thirteenth-century and onward had no other end.
The Italian schools of painting throughout that long evolution in which
they travelled a great way in mind, a great way in time, but in place
shifted only from Pisa first to Bologna last, dealt less with children
than with one Child. An infantine figure was the very centre of their
attention; and this fact has certainly had an incalculably wide and
persistent influence upon character, and therefore upon the course of
history; but it was not less an effect than a cause of gentleness and
civilization. Art was a matter of importance in Europe for four or five
hundred years, and during those centuries the centre of art was the
portraiture of a child in a woman’s arms. Our own day would not suffer
such a thing. Misplaced irony, and the love and fear, at once, of a
quite inappropriate burlesque would forbid it. There was, then, a
straightforward, a natural sentiment, now vanished, in the ages that
chose this young and helpless group for endless repetition; albeit we
call those ages violent. They had the whole Bible to choose from. The
Madonna and Child look so merely a matter of course in the eyes of
everyone who so much as knows the “Old Masters” by their generic name,
that these modern eyes miss the impulse that once set the making of the
Madonna and Child afoot. A manufacture it became, but it had a fresh
beginning and a continuous sanction. The Byzantine who brought the first
Virgin and Child into Italy represented what we should call in our
modern way a public. In order to serve it he made these figures, in
their simplicity and sentiment, the one chief preoccupation of the art
of the new—the second—civilization of Europe. Yet the Crucifixion, the
Descent from the Cross, the great masculine actions and compositions,
were not entirely postponed by this early art. There was no hesitation,
for example, as to their difficulty, inasmuch as the first mediaeval
sculptor was unaware of what modern art calls difficulty; he knew that
his materials must serve him, roughly, in his approach to drama, and in
his use of mere symbols, alike. Assuredly he had no misgivings as to the
representation of the action of a Resurrection, to be indicated in
unpractised and startled stone. It was not, therefore, for the sake of
material simplicity that he and the painter alike chose the Madonna and
Child as the first and the permanent group. We have to ascribe their
choice to the inclination of the mind of the time, first in the country
through which Greek art entered central Europe, and next in the
countries that followed, while they altered, the fashion of foremost
Italy.
Let us grant that this love for children was less conscious, less
deliberate, less meditative, and less articulate than the feeling which,
apart from the arts, we cherish now, but we may well insist that it was
more serious. It was eager to confess the Divinity of a Child; and it is
well worthy of remark that art put out its hand to stay the passing of
the Divine childhood. It took Goethe’s word and cried to the passing
moment: “Stay, thou art so fair!” And that moment was the moment of the
Infancy of Christ. We are inclined, and with justice, to accuse our
fathers—say our fathers of the seventeenth-century and onwards—of
considering childhood too hurriedly, too inconsiderately, as a passage.
Had they known, we aver, of the law of unresting change, of the passage
through which everything living, and even the inorganic creature,
journeys alike; had they known that the very crystals have to grow old,
they would not have been urgent, impatient, and in haste with childhood,
as they certainly were, because it is but a state of transition; they
would not have seen the character of transitoriness, which is
everywhere, exclusively in human childhood, and would not have
reproached the innocent child with what is the universal lot. They
thought great things of their own maturity, and hurried their children
on to that state which is, after all, so brief that it hardly stays long
enough to be known. It is wonderful that they should have been thus
hasty with childhood, and so pushing to get it done, so ill-content with
the state of the infancy of their children, in the age in which Reynolds
painted the “Strawberry Girl,” and later when Blake was writing. For the
genius of the painter and the poet had an incomparable apprehension of
childhood.
[Illustration:
_Alinari_
GIOVANNI BELLINI. MADONNA AND CHILD
(MILAN)
]
One age, then, there was, so little impatient of childhood as to make
perpetual that childhood on which the attention of its art was fixed.
The Infancy of Nazareth was to last for ever. We must not forget the
certain fact that while the painters of the early schools made pictures
of the Child in the Virgin’s arms they prayed to the Child himself as
though he had never grown older. The infancy they worshipped was to them
a permanent mystery. They were indeed in no haste to have it over. If we
often find in the fifteenth-century and the sixteenth-century Bambino a
lack of that which we call infantine, we must not forget that the
painters intended to paint an infant. A very “fine” one in the first
place. No gossips at a christening were ever so eager over the fatness
of a babe as were the masters. And while they intended to paint an
infant, it must not be a child new-born. They would not have him wrapped
in swaddling-clothes and a few hours old, but a full six months old and
with bared limbs, proved to be the finest child “in twenty parishes
round.” There is a Bambino of Giovanni Bellini, in the Brera Gallery of
Milan, in whom, at a year old or so, there appears a definite sadness,
with the signs of fretting disease in the droop of the rounded
cheeks—the cheeks of the thinnest baby are round, but the little spheres
are flaccid; so are they in Bellini’s Bambino, and the limbs are
helpless with fatigue. But this is a rare exception. We may take all
this vaunting of the fine child in the Italian school as a simplicity,
or else as a lack of delicate feeling. Children appeal to us by a
variant of the quality of pathos; for a certain time men and women loved
them best when they were to die like little Dombey. That temper is past;
but we, to-day, find a child who is to live, at least as pathetic as the
readers of Mrs. Beecher Stowe found a child who was to die; and
assuredly ours is the blacker humour, the more ill-conditioned
melancholy; but it is, with differences, all one pathos together, and
modern. The fourteenth-century and after loved a child (in the natural
manner) the better for being high in health and full in flesh.
And yet, after all this apology, I have to confess how seldom childlike
is the Italian Old Masters’ child. The collection in this volume
represents in chief part the exceptions. Rarely and most beautifully, a
purely infantile child—Bambino or angel—more rarely a little Virgin, and
almost as rarely a portrait—shows how suddenly a master perceived the
real character of childishness amid the conventions of his time and of
his art. The Della Robbias, sometimes Botticelli, and Titian in one
great example—these gave the childish look and the childish action of
which they were aware, one hardly knows how, seeing that both were
before the eyes of other masters unperceived. Even through Raphael’s
preoccupation of grace, which has inspired all dancing masters these
many, many years down to Alfred de Musset’s _maître à danser_, when he
told his maiden pupil that she must turn her head over the right
shoulder when her feet went skimming to the left, and over the left
shoulder when they had to speed to the right: “But, that way, I shall
fall,” says the _jeune fille_; “But no,” he replies, sketching with
agility a _chassé_, “Look at me, I don’t fall”; even, I say, through
Raphael’s attitude, destined to so speedy and so long and so Italian a
platitude and commonplace, a perception of the attitude of childhood
breaks at times like a natural action. But not once did it appear to his
followers. The slight corruption of the Raphaelesque attitude was one of
the easiest corruptions in the history of corruptible art. It suited
every tendency of the Latin mind and the whole school of ornament. Rome,
Bologna, and the later Venice improved upon the child of Raphael, used
him for the very structure of decorative composition—his curves,
especially the bow of his young figure, which supports the canopies of
thrones, not manifestly, as it was done by caryatides, but entirely by
way of attitude and composition. But for the plastic art—for the
exquisite art of Luca and Andrea della Robbia—a collection of children
of the Italian schools would have lacked much.
[Illustration:
_Donatello, Sculptr._ _Walker & Cockerell Ph. Sc._
_Head of a Child._
]
The Bambino, the boy St. John, the little angel who hauls his brother by
the hand in the “Last Communion of St. Jerome,” with all their kind, and
the Loves of Titian’s “Garden” with theirs, are of course men-children.
The woman-child is much neglected; but for a little Virgin at the knee
of St. Anne, or a legendary Presentation of the Child Mary in the
Temple, one might look long for a little girl. Chaucer seems to allot
some of the economy of his tenderness to the little daughter of
Griselda; but soon he makes her masquerade as a bride at twelve years
old: and this was their way, in those days, in earnest, of suppressing
the girl-child; they married her out of the way of danger.
“Have here again thy little youngë maid.”
Chaucer’s exquisite line, and the tenderness of the poem “Pearl,” must
stand for the scantling of literary allusion to the woman-child of these
many ages.
In a word, the thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth
centuries had a sentiment of their own for childhood, somewhat unlike
each other’s, together very different from ours. We might be slow to
accuse them, whether of error or defect, seeing that they cannot accuse
us again. Nor had they the experience of our older age, nor the choice
of spirits that lies before us. They were not aware of the turn human
emotions were to take, and doubtless if they had speculated they would
never have guessed prophetically at anything like the child of Reynolds,
or the child of Wordsworth, the child of the Sunday-school, the child of
Mrs. Turner’s moral tales, the child of Dickens, or of Thackeray, or of
the American diarist, or of the naturalist who showed how the new-born
could hang by their hands.
The children of the Italian masters for the greater part are such as the
prejudice of the time would have them, graceful according to an adult
ideal, fat and well-liking, and as beautiful as the hand could make them
when the eye had not learnt to condescend frankly to the conditions of
their life, whether in form or in action. The Greeks had been most
reluctant to recognize the true form—the proportion, for instance, the
relative size of the head and the relative length of upper and lower
limbs. The Italians confessed the characteristic form, but clung to
their own _banal_ idea of grace, the grace that carries the head aside,
the grace of the dancing-master; and imposing this upon the
ultra-childish fat, the exaggerated infancy, the rolling limbs, of their
_bimbi_, they created a little corpulent artificial figure, not like a
man, not like a child, the pet of the ages that brought mediaeval Rome
to the ground by the pickaxe, and set the seal of one style upon the
city and world. It is difficult to associate the painting of Angelico or
that of Benozzo Gozzoli with the neo-classic architecture; insensibly we
place the painters further back, a step nearer to the Gothic, than the
builders. We do so, that is, in regard to their Madonnas, to their
Apostles, Evangelists, Martyrs, and Doctors; in these there is the
upright spirit—they are “early.” Thus the arts are at odds, or look so,
as to “periods.” But that impression disappears when we attend only to
the Bambino. Here is full “Renaissance.” The Bambino goes well with the
classic temple of the academy, with the portico and the pediment, even
the broken pediment; he is of their time.
Amid so many little boys wearing their make-believe childhood in the
posture of indirect grace that living childhood never assumed—a posture
conceived in the adult mind before it was assigned to any picture-child;
amid so many falsified little boys, stand the smaller number of
authentic children. They may be gathered _un peu partout_ from all the
schools of Italy early and late; Florence yields them in the
fourteenth-century and Venice in the sixteenth. The grace of life, as it
were something unexpected, puts out its impulsive and simple arms, or a
laugh breaks through. We find again the child whom the painters had a
little outdone or a little altered for their art, but whose own
incomparable charms meanwhile had never flagged. It had doubtless been
dear to women, in private, outside of the schools, renewing itself in
the freshness of the repetitions of human generations. If the thrush
sings each song twice over, with the “careless rapture” note for note
rehearsed, his indomitable little fathers had sent the same song afloat,
with the same impulse of invention, in the course of centuries. Nor do
the sallies of kittens change, and doubtless the sacred antics of the
spirited Egyptian imp in ambush that is now a mummy were those which the
kitten tries to-day under the spur of an old but unpremeditated joy.
Children in like manner recapture and recapture the outbreak of their
smiles and their fresh ingenuities of play. And the Italian master who
has moulded his bambino heavily, creased his legs and puffed his cheeks
so as to make him very much a child—a fine one, and has turned his neck,
disposed his legs, and raised his eyes so as to make him something more
elegant than a child; the same master, I say, sees at another moment the
sweetness of the truth, and his efforts and prejudices are set aside.
Could there be a better example of this repentance than we may see in
the work of Raphael?
It may be necessary to say that the slight essay following is not a work
of art-criticism, and less—if less could be—an historical study. It does
but record some of the changes of sight and spirit, during the course of
the five centuries of Italian art, in the contemplation and
representation of childhood. It is therefore an essay on a subject of
the designs of certain painters and sculptors, and not on their
workmanship.
THE CHILD OF EARLY ART
In the ages that, since the Renascence, have been called dark, the
scanty art knew but one Child, but this was virtually the first child in
art—the first prevalent child. Whether we hold the art of the time
between the fall of the Roman Empire and the entry of Byzantine art into
Italy—the time that is darkened by the smoke of the destruction, and the
dust of the demolition, of Rome—to be the last art of the antique world
or the first of the modern world; a seed-pod or a bud; an art rigid,
grave, and inexpert with exceeding youth, or bearing those characters
because of extreme age; we find it separated from the past, and allied
to the future, by the motive of its effort, by its desire, by what we
call in our loose language its subject. That subject was chiefly the
child-Christ in the arms of his Mother. When the linear arts came out of
hiding in the Catacombs they came with this burden and for the sake of
this. Learning has not said its last word as to the female figure so
often traced on the subterranean wall—whether the “Orante” was a
symbolic woman or a Madonna; she has no child. But about the woman with
a child there is no doubt. A half-effaced fresco in the Catacomb of
Priscilla has a singular, natural, vivid, well-observed Child glancing
suddenly round from his Mother’s breast with animated eyes—“falcon
eyes,” an Italian writer calls them; and this is from an early hour of
the dark ages, and a mere scratch in a dark place. Since this Catacomb
design has still a spirit, a vitality, a dramatic impulse that relate it
to antiquity, then it is in these places of Christian sepulture that the
old art lived its latest unmistakable life, and then passed into that
ambiguous state I spoke of but now. For the falcon-eyed child is
conjecturally of the early part of the third century, thirteen hundred
years, that is, before Raphael; Raphael has much the same action in the
“Madonna della Seggiola.” It would be too much to say that, except in
sculpture, this vitality of childish movement lapsed during those
thirteen centuries, passed, in linear art, from the nameless hand of the
Christian in the Catacomb into the glorious hand of Raphael on the
summits of sixteenth-century Rome; but it might almost be said. For in
the pre-Raphaelite painted Bambini there is something less quick, less
instant, than in the little head of the Catacomb of Priscilla, and in
the little head of Raphael’s picture.
The rest of the Catacomb designs are, as has been said, ambiguous,
between two worlds; the rigidity of weakness is in them; the proportion
of childhood is lost—for let us add to the strange honours of the
Priscilla drawing this fact—that the size of the Child’s head is there
according to nature. After this the Catacomb designs keep their
“dark-ages” character. Moreover, from a Roman tomb of an even earlier
date than that of the Catacomb Child—the vault of a tomb of the first or
second century—we have slight sketches in relief, amongst which is a
child; he is exceedingly young, and springs, seated, as a child who
cannot walk springs on his nurse’s arm; but this child is driving a
dragon, and doing it with spirit and with shouting. He is perfectly
childish in proportion, a large-headed, animated boy, for whom some baby
sat, in the time of Trajan, leaping at some vigorous fancy of his own.
This work, by the way, is so skilful, as bas-relief, that we cannot rank
it with the equivocal early Christian drawing; this dragon-driver and
all the other work from the same tomb is decidedly late-antique, and not
early-modern; it is only the Christian art that bears the twilight
character—twilight of nightfall or of daybreak?—in its seclusion.
Next come the majestic mosaics of the Byzantine churches, from the
sixth-century Madonna and Child in the Basilica of Sant’ Apollinare
Nuovo, at Ravenna, to the beautiful twelfth-century Madonna and Child of
the Duomo of Torcello. Majestic, indeed, are they, albeit not only
ignorant but weak, barbaric in the early examples, and loaded—the
crowned woman and the crowned doll-child—with ornaments as rigid as
their eyes; but all-noble at their worst and best. It is only at the
close of these ages that notes on Italian schools should properly begin.
The Italian schools grew from the Byzantine in Italy; and they had there
a great origin. The Renascence, if we give the name to this evolution of
an art, was no sudden thing. Imperceptibly the art of the alien mosaic
passed into the art of national painting. Cimabue made, if one may say
so bold a thing, very little difference. That his Madonna was portable
may have been, after all, the chief cause for the carrying in
procession; that he “held the field” in Florence may have been chiefly
by reason of his Florentine citizenship. At Siena, in the same Tuscan
country, Cimabue had contemporaries and equals. Margaritone d’Arezzo was
born some twenty-five years earlier than he, and was hardly that quarter
of a century more Byzantine. Duccio di Buoninsegna, whose “Madonna and
Child,” with contemplative angels, has at least as much as Cimabue’s
flexibility, followed him closely in time. And Duccio’s angels, leaning
on their hands on the back of the Madonna’s throne to look at her Child
and her, have a quiet drama of attitude and look, as full of promise as
the best action of the attendant angels of Cimabue. The Child of all
these first masters of Italy has the arbitrary proportions, the erect
attitude of the time, the aspect of a strange small man, which was, let
us remember, as far as we know, the fiction that Greece herself
approved. Cimabue places him on his mother’s arm, rather than on her
knee, but, needless to say, with no weight; one hand is raised in the
action of the Papal blessing—three fingers up to represent the Holy
Trinity. Cimabue does not give child-angels to the Bambino for
companions; none of his angels, I think, can be said to be children.
When we pass from the mere image of the Virgin and Child to the
representation of the Nativity, art becomes, in a certain degree,
dramatic. Inasmuch as it “illustrates,” the criticism of our day would
call it literary; but it is not more literary than life is literary. The
plastic and linear arts have to do with all that the eyes can see; that
is their large province: expression, action, significant attitude, moral
beauty and intellectual beauty in their aspect, passion in its aspect;
all these as well as decoration. The great schools had no doubts as to
this matter. And the art that was not yet a school, and hardly still, or
hardly yet, an art at all, fumbled at the scene of action, even in the
Catacombs. In the acrosolium of one of the dark galleries of the
Catacomb hard by the basilica of Saint Sebastian, on the Appian Way, is
a little painting of a wooden bench, upon which lies the child-Christ,
swaddled, with two animals at his side. This is conjecturally of the
fourth-century. It is the first “Nativity.” In regard to the character
of art it is the first, and Correggio’s “Notte” is among the last. For
after Parma and Venice art ceases to go on a steadfast, confident and
coherent way; it breaks as a thread of water breaks into drops.
Virtually, if not in actual date, Correggio was the latest of the great.
He showed plainly the corruption of art in the near future, while in the
immortal Venetians who were his contemporaries there was not even
corruptibility. Incomparable colour kept them in exalted health—colour
and tone. As much as colour, assuredly the tone of Titian and
Tintoretto—the tone of a head against the sky as Tintoretto painted it,
or the tone of the arm against the cloud in Titian’s “Amor Sagro e
Profano,” secured the art of Venice against the thought of decadence.
But decadence was close upon Parma and Rome. During all these ages of
genius, then, the art of painting was intent upon the representation of
the Nativity.
It shrank, however, from representing a new-born child, even in the
manger; the Nativity, though dramatically rendered, was to be
contemplated as a mystery, rather than watched in the taking-place. Thus
the Child is nearly always nude, for the sake of the round forms, and
some months old. But Giotto, who clothes all his figures heavily, has
sometimes a draped and sometimes a swaddled Child, and obviously tries
to make the scene “like” the fact. And the two intentions keep pace for
some time until the Mystery gains. The Nativity takes place then in the
open country, amongst splendid buildings, or under a triumphal arch; and
the donors of the picture and their patron saints attend with Milton’s
“bright-harness’d angels” at the “courtly stable.”
[Illustration:
_Alinari_
SCHOOL OF DONATELLO. ANGELS
(PADUA)
]
[Illustration:
_Houghton_
DONATELLO. WINGED PUTTI
(FLORENCE)
]
[Illustration:
_Houghton_
DONATELLO. THE LITTLE ST. JOHN
(FLORENCE)
]
TUSCAN SCULPTURE AND ENAMEL
In Florence the art of the modeller was far in advance of the painter’s.
This is not unintelligible, for the sculptor had under his eyes the
sculpture of the past, whereas the painter had no painting; he had the
conventions and code of a virtually new art to decide. The mosaics and
the illuminations were all that the early painters possessed for
precedents and models. The difficult art of bas-relief had become
Italian through the first Tuscan who learnt of the last Greek; but
Italian painting had nothing nearer to Antiquity than some so-called
Madonnas of the painter-Evangelist Saint Luke. The mosaics and the
illuminations were, indeed, Byzantine, and indirectly Greek. But compare
the figures of the enthroned mosaic Madonna at Ravenna, and her
ceremonial Child, with the classic sarcophagus that inspired the Pisan.
The one is Byzantine, the other Greek. The sculptor, then, inherited the
rules of the art. The painter had to devise, for instance, the treatment
of a certain degree of perspective by means of the linear art.
Margaritone d’Arezzo, born in the year of Magna Charta, and the Sienese
who was his contemporary, and Cimabue who followed him after a score of
years, together established the general terms of painting.
Thus the Tuscan sculptor, set free by his possession of an established
art, was at ease with nature and the convention of bust and bas-relief,
and with nature’s simple and wild creature the child.
Giovanni Pisano was born some five years before the nearly Byzantine,
the majestic but captive, Cimabue. In the cathedral of Prato and in the
Camposanto at Pisa are Bambini of Giovanni’s that are agile, springing
in the mother’s arms, playing with her diadem, perfect children. His
father Niccola was in art virtually a Greek, but his glorious “Nativity”
upon the Pisa pulpit and that on the Siena pulpit do not, of course,
show us a spirited child; though, by the way, Fra Guglielmo of Pisa has
an animated little infant whom the women attending the Virgin wash in a
stream, at the mouth of the cave of the Nativity, from which sheltered
sheep are drinking. Giovanni Pisano’s Bambino is assuredly one of the
earliest of Italian children studied from life and full of life. And
when we speak of the fifteenth-century’s re-discovery of childish
proportion, let us remember that this great sculptor observed it, and
was born early in the thirteenth.
[Illustration:
_Alinari_
DONATELLO. HEAD OF A CHILD
(FLORENCE)
]
[Illustration:
JACOPO DELLA QUERCIA. MADONNA AND CHILD
(SOUTH KENSINGTON)
]
Painting was still an art in bonds and difficulties when Donatello
produced his beautiful bas-reliefs of a natural Bambino, and the
exquisitely modelled bust with the face delicately broad across the
charming eyes, and narrowing to the chin—whether called the young St.
John or not, purely the portrait of a tender boy; and his lovely
boy-Mercury. Fra Angelico was demurely reckless with his anatomy when
Jacopo della Quercia, the Sienese, was modelling the perfect hands of
his Madonna and her perfect Child in one of the statuettes by the master
which are amongst the original treasures of South Kensington Museum;
also when Luca della Robbia was using his material with a masterly and
liberal hand in the sketch for his bas-relief for the singing gallery of
the Duomo at Florence, a sketch wilder and more animated than the
finished work. (South Kensington has this incomparable stucco.) The
children of this relief move with impulse and energy in a youthful
dance; in another panel they go clashing cymbals, six cymbals at once
used with a will. The works of this master, the inventor of the
enamelled coloured terra cotta that bears his name, and the eldest of
the three who used it, are of ever fresh variety. His, amongst others,
is the Bambino who gives best the Papal blessing. There is nothing but
what is charming in this action; fantastic as it looks with a baby face
fresh from nature, it does nothing but delight us. Botticelli’s
wonderful picture, his masterpiece, the “Magnificat,” in which the
Child, turning his face upwards, points to the open page, does not
reconcile the action with infancy, but Luca della Robbia makes his
little infant a Pontiff with sweetness and ease. Somewhat like this
wholly delightful Bambino is Rossellino’s, the terra cotta statuette at
South Kensington, in which the smile breaks into an open laugh. The
Madonna laughs also; at least she has a sub-hilarious face as she looks
down at her noisy child, sees the soft gap-toothed mouth, and feels the
little tumult of mirth in the breast under her hand. This is something
altogether different from the benignant smile, a bestowed smile, with
which the painter in the later centuries adorns the Virgin and Child.
Luca della Robbia also has a laughing Child in a bas-relief now in the
Berlin Museum, and he too makes the Mother laugh with him.
[Illustration:
LUCA DELLA ROBBIA. SKETCH FOR A PANEL OF THE SINGING GALLERY IN THE
DUOMO, FLORENCE
(SOUTH KENSINGTON)
]
[Illustration:
_Houghton_
LUCA DELLA ROBBIA. PANEL OF THE SINGING GALLERY IN THE DUOMO, FLORENCE
(FLORENCE)
]
When we turn to the _putti_ who are not Christs nor perhaps angels,
little laymen dancing in a _rondo_ or joyous in procession, or
decoratively employed, loaded with thick wreaths of flower, fruit, and
leaf, laurel, pomegranate, and convolvulus, it is still more difficult
to remember that Luca della Robbia and Angelico da Fiesole were of the
same age; according to one computation the one but a year older than the
other. Luca with his ware not only was a liberal student of nature, but
was free enough to use his material gaily. The painter meanwhile was
moving with the stiffness of experiment; we might place his child in a
church of the early Gothic that had long ceased when he was painting,
but Luca della Robbia’s enamel _puttino_ would seem in place in any age
of worthy architecture. Stone, colour, and the Della Robbia ware had
their several historic ages, concurrent, but different. More than sixty
years later, two other contemporaries, Andrea della Robbia and
Botticelli, show something of the same contrast, generally in a lesser
degree; but in one respect the contrast of the two later men is equal to
that of the two earlier—the anatomy of Botticelli was still reckless, at
any rate in the draped figure, whilst that of Andrea della Robbia was
easily correct. Botticelli, indeed, follows Angelico, his much less
expert predecessor, precisely in a strange ideal of the female figure;
both feign that the body has a long region from the ribs to the hip;
they interpolate a tract, as it were, unknown to nature. Below this,
Botticelli sets the jutting legs of his Graces. Below this, in like
manner, but under draperies that disguise the manner of junction, Fra
Angelico discreetly places the limbs of his seated figures, with
entirely arbitrary knees. It is worth noting that Botticelli does not
play this anatomical prank with the nude figure in his beautiful “Birth
of Venus.” This, however, is not a matter of childish proportion;
Botticelli habitually tries for the right proportions of nature in his
children.
[Illustration:
_Alinari_
LUCA DELLA ROBBIA. CHILD WITH FLOWERS AND FRUIT
(CITTA DI CASTELLO)
]
[Illustration:
_Alinari_
LUCA DELLA ROBBIA. CHILD WITH FLOWERS AND FRUIT
(CITTA DI CASTELLO)
]
Luca della Robbia is surely one of those immortal artists whose work
hardly has a date. It might have been immortal _a parte ante_ as well as
_a parte post_. It has no obvious beginning, being purely natural and
simple. His own invention of enamelled terra cotta, which after a time
he perfected with colour, gave him a material that did not alter and the
dainty clear surface whereof takes no smirch of time. It is most
appropriate to his fresh and spiritual genius, which, finding nothing
quite fitted to it in the gold and bronze of its earlier labours,
devised this ware, plastic as clay and cheerful as porcelain. Enamelled
terra cotta is perpetually young. Most appropriate to his genius and to
his material also was the subject of his art. The Virgin and Child are
necessary to that lovely art; they are the centre, they sit enthroned
over the arch or the middle stone of the doorway it decorates, and the
little laymen stand about them with their heavy garlands. Let us add
that with the gaiety of porcelain, the Della Robbia ware has no
triviality; it is sweetly venerable; its pale blue and white especially
accords with the oldest convent threshold that it ever brightened.
Matteo Civitali and Verrocchio, also Tuscans, and like the Della Robbias
sculptors of children (to apply the name of sculptor somewhat loosely),
were architects chiefly, and therefore sculptors as a matter of course.
They are not so sportive as their predecessor Donatello in his earlier
work, but follow him rather in the graver dignity to which that great
sculptor had changed his type in course of time. A Bambino of
Verrocchio’s gives the benediction, standing before a regal mother
richly apparelled; so does a Bambino of Benedetto da Maiano’s; one of
Pellegrini’s clings closely to the neck of her who leans one beautiful
cheek upon his head; but amongst the innumerable variations of attitude
appropriate to sculpture in many a form, from that of enamel to that of
bronze, there is nothing quite like one of Jacopo della Quercia’s
groups, where the Bambino and the Virgin look into each other’s eyes.
The Madonna and Child of a thousand other designs, in sculpture as in
painting, are not intended to seem alone. The Child giving the
benediction has the city and the world before him, or at any rate a
congregation of Tuscan people; he who smiles from his place on the
mother’s knee has the passers-by on the dusty roads in sight; and the
Suckling who looks over his round shoulder is startled because someone
perhaps kneels too near. But this one Mother and Child are quite alone;
he has both hands upon her shielding arm, and holds back his head and
meets her eyes fully. In much Italian art (as I have been obliged to
repeat) there is some form of grace that hinders immediate action and
expression; but these workers in terra cotta have no such interception,
no such thing postponing, deferring, removing the expression of life,
preventing and hindering the close clasp which is the only real manner
of holding a baby. Let this solitary Mother and Child be one example,
and we shall find others in Desiderio da Settignano’s portrait-busts at
South Kensington, tender and fine models of creative childish life. Here
we find no preoccupation or prejudice (such as the painters so soon
assumed), tending quickly to commonplace and platitude. Desiderio (his
date is somewhat later than Luca della Robbia’s, but Luca is the master
of the rest) has observed the childishness of the protruding upper lip,
that innocent incident of infancy, as the protruding lower lip is an
experienced incident of old age. The one and the other were modelled in
these terra cotta busts from life. Luca della Robbia observes also the
weakness of the soft mouth of childhood, with the underlip a little
sucked in; he models the lips lightly and feebly apart, in two of the
portrait-busts at South Kensington. Domenico da Capo d’Istria has a fine
erect Bambino, as upright in his spirit as in his attitude; no twist, no
head aside is his; and Mino da Fiesole is equally frank in his Saint
John the Baptist. These are examples, and no more, representatives of a
great school of natural art that lasted nearly a century in Italy.
[Illustration:
_Jacopo della Quercia_ _Walker & Cockerell Ph Sc_
_Madonna and Child._
]
[Illustration:
ROSSELLINO. MADONNA AND CHILD
(SOUTH KENSINGTON)
]
[Illustration:
_Alinari_
BENEDETTO DA MAIANO. MADONNA AND CHILD
(PRATO)
]
[Illustration:
_Houghton_
VERROCCHIO. MADONNA AND CHILD
(FLORENCE)
]
Luca della Robbia is simple, but Andrea della Robbia, in the succeeding
generation, is more divinely simple yet. It would be difficult to place
him “later” in spirit than his elder. In such a detail as the treatment
of the framing wreaths of close leaves and fruits, he keeps the rich
severity of the natural design. Giovanni, the third of the name, lost
the severity. And Andrea, in his groups of Madonna and Child, rejects
everything that is less than perfect; here is the blue ground, here the
lovely Virgin and the lovely Child—two tranquil heads, the veil, the
hands, and a few straight summer clouds lying in a blue sky. The
altar-piece, probably by him, which represents the Madonna giving her
girdle to Saint Thomas in a vision after the Assumption, has a
_mandorla_ of little angels’ heads, and in another beautiful relief they
are yet more various—a canopy of delicate portraits with the childish
gravity and the childish laugh and the incidents of vital likeness. The
“Madonna of the Cushion,” at Palermo, is crowned with five such
portraits of living angels. It is worth noting, too, how well this
master observed the childish figure, for in one of the medallions for
the Hospital of the Innocents he shows the slight infantine narrowness
across the body just under the arms. To the works of these great artists
must be added some terra cottas to which no name has been assigned—a
fine Florentine boy looking out broadly—called, like most of these
portrait-busts, Saint John the Baptist; a beautiful Bacchic cupid, also
Florentine and fifteenth-century. But the cupids are few in this art,
which was altogether natural and sacred.
Before ending this glance at the children of Italian fifteenth-century
sculpture, let a brief word be said of one child by the
sixteenth-century master, the master of masters, Michelangiolo. His
bas-relief in the National Museum at Florence is a _tondo_ which
contains the whole figures of Mother and Child, because she sits
crouching with her feet drawn back, and the curve of the little figure
of the child-Christ holds just within the circle. The master has not
intended to give any childish action to this childish form. With the
artificial action and attitude of a man, the Infant leans one elbow on
his mother’s open book, and his head on his hand. Nor is the Infant of
the famous Bruges Virgin less unchildlike. It is not to Michelangiolo
that we must look for a child indeed. From the meek masters of a hundred
influential years before, the passage is not less than disastrous to
this arrogant work of a greatness o’er-leaping itself and falling into a
sort of sickliness.
[Illustration:
_Alinari_
ANDREA DELLA ROBBIA. HEAD OF A CHILD
(FLORENCE)
]
But there is another step to be taken from the noble presence of
Donatello, the Della Robbias, Desiderio da Settignano, Pellegrini,
Benedetto da Maiano, Jacopo della Quercia, and the rest of that company;
it is the step into the nineteenth-century tea-room under the same roof
at South Kensington. This is a room decorated in enamelled terra cotta,
Luca della Robbia’s imperishable happy material, from top to bottom, in
singularly distressing colours and designs of which the figures of
children form a part—_putti_ dancing, playing with animals, making music
and so forth, on the brown and white columns. He, or they, who made
these deplorable little figures, had not learnt the principles of the
difficult art of relief, and, working in relief on a cylinder, produced
arms and legs out of all measure and shape. This discouraging
parenthesis is worth writing, if only for the sake of protest against
the modern usurpation of material. The decorators of this tea-room ought
to make their figures out of something modern, and to leave enamelled
terra cotta to those who had a right to it.
To return to Michelangiolo, master of our mixed feelings. Most adult of
men, he creates unearthly, unheavenly children of violence, and twists
them in strife and effort amongst the mighty ornaments of his Sistine
roof; but the young Christs of his sculpture are less than mighty.
THE FLORENTINE PAINTERS—I
The sculptors had recognized the form and proportion of the childish
figure, and, more, the incidental characters of the units of childhood.
The heavenly Della Robbias had nothing left unlearnt that their art
needed to know of nature. But when painting, belated, began to represent
the figure, it looked backward to its few examples, chiefly the mosaics,
and adopted their bantling, the small-headed child, the son of Greek
tradition, whose second life in the early Renascence in Italy was due
perhaps to a corrupt following of Greece (one cannot say of Greek art in
the “Laocoon,” for that very late Rhodian work was not unburied until
the sixteenth-century), perhaps to some authentic ignorance appropriate
to the inexpert art of painting. However this may be, here are painters,
contemporary with our sculptors, reverting to the conventional child of
the _bassi tempi_. Not only Cimabue did this, but Fra Angelico, and
sometimes Benozzo Gozzoli. Fra Angelico is in all respects a man of a
certain character rather than a certain date. He was early in character,
and should perhaps have had his place in the preceding chapter, in spite
of the prevalent sentiment that honours him as one of the masters of the
noblest Florentine school. It is at least a tenable opinion that
Masaccio was the first great Florentine painter; that Giotto is to be
judged, for all his genius, and despite the certain truth that he takes
the longest stride set by any man in the course of modern art, with
indulgence; whereas Masaccio is absolutely a great designer. As for Fra
Angelico, we have to remind ourselves that more than a hundred years lie
between his birth and Giotto’s. That his painting was an untimely
contemporary with the enamel of Luca della Robbia we have already
wondered to observe. And being thus passed on the road, Fra Angelico
shows the lagging of his art—lagging, with all its beauties—to be
different from the custom of his time, or from that just about to
develop, chiefly in two things, facial expression and the natural form
of childhood.
[Illustration:
_Alinari_
BENOZZO GOZZOLI. ST. SEBASTIAN
(SAN GIMIGNANO)
]
He was, in a degree, dramatic; but if we take expression to refer to
the face, and to the eyes above all—“countenance,” in the
eighteenth-century, was much what we call expression now—then we
cannot say that he was the painter of expressive looks. That he could
be, in an infantile way, dramatic, he proved by the activity of some
of his little devils when the sweet Frate compelled himself to oppose
these symbols of evil to the garlanded representatives of good; and it
might be possible to find something a little dramatic in the movement
of those figures of trumpet-bearing angels by which his various and
most interesting art continues to be made popular. He has, in fact,
possession of a certain little energy of action, in the absence of any
changes in the wreathed faces of the blest, or in the still looks of a
Madonna. For expression he does little more than mark a harmless
forehead with a frown. As he took no part in the then modern search
for expression, so he took very little in the new knowledge of the
figure of children. See, for example, the children in the Vatican
picture, “Saint Laurence distributing alms to the poor and widows.”
There is sweetness in the Frate’s design of the four little ones in
this composition. The baby caresses his mother, a little girl looks up
at the beneficent deacon, a very good boy and girl who have received
their alms go away together with an affectionate little game, and the
painter has made them pretty to the utmost of his power, giving them
orderly curls, with a forehead of great height for the girl—and a
fifteenth-century painter could do no more than this for woman or
girl. But the proportions are nearly those of the adult figure, and
the little ones with their graces look like smooth-headed dolls. In
the “Madonna and Child” of the San Marco Museum at Florence, in the
“Madonna and Child” at the Uffizi Gallery, as in the same master’s
repetition of the same subject, the Bambini are little dolls—the first
an affectionate doll, full of something lighter than sawdust, sitting
on nothing, but still trying sincerely to lay a filial little face
against the Madonna’s cheek; the second a ceremonial doll, holding the
globe and giving the benediction, but yet all dolls because of their
proportions. In the most important of Fra Angelico’s altar-pieces—the
“Coronation of the Virgin” in the Accademia at Florence, painted in
1441 for the Prior Francesco Maringhi—two little children have the
middle place in the foreground; they are evidently introduced at the
suggestion of their parents in order to recommend them devoutly to
heavenly favour. They have been given into the care of two Saints, a
man and a woman, doubtless their patrons. If the Frate has intended
any portraiture, it is not enough to define them; they are merely
little Tuscans on their knees.
[Illustration:
_Houghton_
BENOZZO GOZZOLI. ST. AUGUSTINE AT SCHOOL (Detail)
(SAN GIMIGNANO)
]
[Illustration:
_Houghton_
BENOZZO GOZZOLI. ST. AUGUSTINE AT SCHOOL (Detail)
(SAN GIMIGNANO)
]
Masaccio yields us little. He was as much an adult as Michelangiolo; but
when he designs a little child it is with more feeling and less
condescension. I find a slight figure in the “Almsgiving” of the
Brancacci chapel, in the Carmelite Church at Florence, an infant
naturally unconcerned in what is going forward; in the San Clemente
paintings another child naturally clumsy; a Bambino clasping the
Virgin’s neck closely, at Bremen; at San Clemente, again, a doll-like
child on the shoulder of Saint Christopher.
In the order of time, Fra Filippo Lippi follows near to Fra Angelico,
being twenty-five years later in date of birth, but much more in the
consciousness and complexity of mind, and the learning of the art. With
Fra Filippo, as with many others, the child-Christ and the boy Saint
John are nearly the whole of childhood. In the beautiful Berlin picture,
the Bambino lies with one finger to his mouth, on a carpet of flowers in
a wood. The figure is infantine, the action infantine, but the grace is
artificial; almost as equivocal is the Saint John, round and youthful,
standing with his thin rod of a cross and his little pennon,
but—resolved to compass an Italian elegance as indispensable to
design—the painter has disposed the little legs in the attitude of adult
strength and adult idleness and leisure; no child stands so, in unstable
equilibrium; a child uses both legs in repose, and gets what grip of the
ground he can. It is evident that Filippo Lippi did not intend to give
the familiar way of a child, but the ideal way of a “San Giovannino” in
Florentine art. In a _tondo_ at the Pitti Palace, Fra Filippo introduces
the “Nativity of the Virgin” in the background of a “Virgin and Child.”
Of the new-born Mary in the distance there is nothing to say, except
that Saint Anne seems to be caressing the cheek of her swaddled
daughter. A little girl, of no obvious meaning, is also in the picture;
through an archway is seen the encounter of Saint Joachim and Saint
Anne, the tired husband welcomed by his wife on the steps of their
dwelling before the birth of Mary. The Bambino himself, in the
foreground group, is, truth to say, an ugly Bambino, in the painter’s
despite, seated in the lap of a very lovely and innocent Madonna. In one
of the most beautiful of Fra Filippo’s simpler paintings, the group at
the Uffizi, two angels lift up the Child on their hands, so that the
Madonna, in her charmingly elaborate veil, may contemplate her son and
pray with her two hands joined. One of these young boy-angels looks over
his shoulder with the wearisome Italian grace, even then already a
platitude.
[Illustration:
_Houghton_
FRA ANGELICO. ST. LAURENCE GIVING ALMS (Detail)
]
Benozzo Gozzoli’s seventy years were well within the quattrocento; he
did not see the summits of the sixteenth-century. In a symbolic
composition such as his “Saint Sebastian” in the Church of Sant’
Agostino at Gimignano, he gives to his children something of the old
conventional proportion. The whole noble gathering of heaven and earth
is, in this painting, arbitrary. Saint Sebastian is colossal, and
amongst the little people on their knees at his pedestal are smaller
people who are a kind of children, smooth boys on this side, smooth
girls on that. It is a singular Sebastian, free of all his arrows,
clothed and combed with decorum, his martyrdom finished, and the long
work of intercession begun. But Heaven is busy with his arrows. One is
in the hand of the Eternal Father; the seraphim hold arrows instead of
trumpets, and pierce with them the clouds of the floor of the skies; the
angels that crown the Saint hold the arrow and the palm; broken arrows
are scattered in the middle region, a flying angel snaps one in two.
With all this, the action is curiously undramatic. That amid a dramatic
people whose daily talk, whose voices, whose hands, are dramatic, there
should be painters so failing—and there are many—is hard to understand
unless we consider the embarrassment of the celestial company and
attitude—the real shyness. An Italian himself would call it
“_soggezione_.” And in fact he does lose something of his drama in talk
when he is addressing a stranger or a superior, and regains it instantly
with an almost grotesque expressiveness—for the tone of the voice, the
language of the fingers are more than fit—when he turns from the
stranger to say something to a fellow-citizen, or when he has to talk of
his own daily affairs. So Benozzo Gozzoli, whose upper angels have rigid
and unmeaning hands, and whose Christ and Madonna in this same picture
use symbolic but inexpressive actions, has more drama in the multitude
of the faithful on earth; and in the “Saint Augustine at School” he is
free and has the natural impulse. In the sad scene of the chastisement
in this picture is an urchin in a spotted cap, holding his inkhorn and
pen, who is dramatically admirable. So are the two boys on their way to
school, although they are doing little. The painter has intended—except
perhaps for a slight convention in the hands—to design childish
children, and to make them childishly beautiful. We see more of boys,
clothed and about their business, in Benozzo Gozzoli’s frescoes at the
Camposanto of Pisa than in a hundred years of the work of other Tuscans.
[Illustration:
BOTTICELLI. From the “STORY OF MOSES” (Detail)
(ROME)
]
The “re-animate Greek,” Botticelli, had but to recall, and hardly to
learn, Antiquity, when that “new learning” which was the old came to
Florence; such is Ruskin’s judgment of this painter, of whom others are
not so sure. For example, one might think his sadness—the sadness of his
Venus—to be something rather of the latter civilization than of the
former; another might find the whole spirit that looks askance from the
beautiful eyes of Botticelli’s Saint Johns and his stripling angels to
be wholly mediaeval and Christian. But in the Madonna he has, almost
invariably, the undisturbed look, above expression, which it is
possible, by some effort, to assign to the Greek original, the antique
ancestry, of his mind. This serenity the Madonna shares with the
rejoicing goddess, with the Graces, with all the gay flower-spotted
persons of the “Primavera.” Needless to say, his children are not Greek.
His child-Christ would be more beautiful if Botticelli had not been
obviously bound to the good gossiping parochial fifteenth-century idea
of a fine child, a champion child. It must be what the French call
_plantureux_. To assign to this _physique_ a conscious intelligence, to
make of a full-fed boy, six months old, a kind of theologian, is to
create a little figure of ambiguous aspect and manners. In one group he
points to the open book, in another he seems to teach his mother from
the spread page. Botticelli was a religious man and, according to Mr.
Berenson, “the greatest artist of lineal design that Europe has ever
had.” His double preoccupation had regard, firstly, to the beauty and
dignity of the Mother and the splendid physical condition and wisdom of
the Child, so that his picture should express his devotion and satisfy
that of all who looked at it; and secondly, to the perfection of the
decorative composition. He had few of the group of “feelings” with
which, after five hundred years of life, art, and literature, true and
false, we contemplate a child. It is impossible that the world should
have passed these centuries without learning some new loves amongst many
studies in humanity; and, accordingly, we, having lost much, have gained
that company of emotions which we call our love of nature. It would be
insincere to profess that we find it in Botticelli; his true lovers
prize him for more appropriate, more timely, and more national qualities
of heart and vision. His love of nature in the Bambino brings about that
charming holding-out of the arms, and inexpert caressing, of the Bardi
picture at Berlin, the early Santa Maria Nuova “Madonna and Child with
Angels,” and the “Madonna delle Rose” of the Pitti Palace, to take
typical examples. The last-named is generally judged to be, though
something more than a _quadro di scuola_, not altogether from
Botticelli’s hands. But the Child’s action, if not the drawing, is at
any rate Botticellian; and it assuredly does not come within our present
love of nature. It is not nearer to our sense of childish attitude and
action than are the roses that fill the background of this _tondo_ to
our sense of the character, the growth, the aspect, the stalks, leaves,
thorns, buds, and faces of roses. Here is something different from
convention, which uses the mere suggestions of natural form for rigid
decoration. Botticelli’s roses and golden fruits are not ruled in ranks.
They and his Bambini are the fruits of his love of nature, a love of
nature at arm’s length. It is in some of the angels, and in more than
one Saint John, that the look is more direct; both the beauty and the
expression are immediate, or almost immediate, as close as Botticelli
chose to approach, or perhaps was able to approach. The lovely _tondo_
in our National Gallery has been at different times held to be by the
master, by a pupil working under the master’s direction, and by a
painter merely of the Florentine school of Botticelli’s century.
Whatever hand designed and painted this beautiful group was the hand of
genius. No study of children painted by the Italian masters could pass
over these exquisite heads. They are heads of later childhood, the age
of Saint John the Baptist being decided upon by the painter’s choice.
Historically he would be, as Raphael so often makes him, a companion
infant to our Lord; it is characteristic of the painter of this Madonna
and of other doubtful Botticellian work—for instance, the picture at the
Louvre—to group a Baptist of some twelve years old with the infant
Christ. The three heads have thus a touching difference in their
youthfulness. In the National Gallery picture there are angels of Saint
John’s age, and of equal beauty. The young Baptist is clad in his
camel’s hair and carries his slender cross. In all these lovely faces
there is the Botticellian length; but whereas the undoubted Botticelli
was somewhat fond of an oblong shape, especially, it would seem, when he
aimed at singular beauty, the school-painter has the long form with a
pointed chin. Botticelli in his later years drew the face with a
slightly pointed chin. He and his pupil, if pupil it was, had alike an
ideal eyebrow, arched and far above the eye, implying a huge eye-socket
or orbit, but one filled smoothly with flesh. That space between the
eyebrow and the closure of the eyelid was so dear to the painter in
question that he carried it perhaps beyond the probabilities of anatomy,
certainly beyond experience; in the unquestioned work of Botticelli it
has hardly the look of wistfulness that the school-painter gives it,
allying it with the gaiety of the chin. The Saint John of the Louvre
group, that beautiful boy with sidelong look and folded arms, has the
eyebrows and the chin. So has Botticelli’s own Bambino in the picture at
the Pitti, in which the Child is about to kiss his Mother.
[Illustration:
_Houghton_
BOTTICELLI. MADONNA AND CHILD (Detail)
(FLORENCE)
]
Finally, these notes on the typical children of Botticelli should close
upon the most noble composition known as “The Childhood of Moses”
amongst the frescoes in the Sistine Chapel. It is a part of the great
composition of the “History of Moses,” in which Botticelli painted seven
scenes from the life, or rather the early life, of the Patriarch—that
is, from the smiting of the Egyptian who had slain a Hebrew, to the
Exodus. The childhood of Moses does not appear, but the latest scene of
the picture, the leading-forth of Israel, contains the figures of two
children; hence, perhaps, through some misapprehension, the customary
name. It is the child who, without labour, bears the burden of all
pilgrimages, even that of the mere change of home; here are the people
going into the wilderness, and Botticelli bears in mind the children who
are to be tired and to weep upon the road. Moses leads out a little
company whereby the painter represents Israel. They are loaded with
their few possessions; and the foremost group is that of two young
unequal boys. The elder carries his bundle, and with the bundle a little
lively dog; the younger uses both hands to cling to his mother’s hand
and arm; he must make two steps to one of the men and women. He too is a
“fine child” of the time; but perhaps because the master in designing
this beautiful head did not labour especially for wisdom and the favour
of God and man, he has produced more simple nobility than in painting
many a child-Christ. The elder boy pities him, looking down with the
passionless aspect of _quattrocento_ feeling at the largely-moulded
infantine face; and the young one looks up with a directly sorrowful
appeal, but with beauty undiscomposed. Also in the Sistine frescoes is
Botticelli’s boy with a snake. It is evidently a fine figure, now more
than half effaced; the child, encumbered with an armful of grapes, looks
down at his leg, around which the snake is clinging. Professor Steinmann
sees in this design—and the likeness is manifest even in the present
decay—an imitation of the antique statue, “The Child with a Serpent,”
now in the museum of the Capitol. Botticelli, the Florentine, summoned
to Rome by Pope Sixtus IV., to work with Ghirlandajo, Perugino, and
Cosimo Rosselli at the decoration of those walls of his chapel which
Michelangiolo was not to paint, had the art of Antiquity before his
eyes, fragments of much that had been then newly shattered, relics of
ancient Rome, and some few of that ancient Greece of which Ruskin holds
him to have been the true citizen. He gives us this one clear sign of
his attention to the art of the past—the figure of a child. Leaving
Rome, he returned to his work for convent and church—the Madonna, the
young angel, the holy Child. He returned also to the study of Dante;
Vasari charges him, without reason, with giving to this literature the
time due to his art. Botticelli did, in fact, follow his own art
diligently until those last years which were given to the yet closer
practice of his religion.
[Illustration:
_D. Anderson_
BOTTICELLI. BOY WITH A SNAKE (Detail)
(ROME)
]
THE FLORENTINE PAINTERS—II
When Domenico Ghirlandajo painted for the church of Santa Maria Novella
the stateliest of all the Nativities of Mary, arranging the scene in a
palace chamber and admitting a company of Florentine ladies to
congratulate Saint Anne, he crowned the decorated room with a frieze of
nude children at play. They are the _putti_ of whom art, by that time,
had made an established convention, and of whom in time to come art was
to make a continual commonplace. Something in these equivocal children,
infantile and yet not infantile, graceful as the adult would have them
and corpulent as the gossip would have them, so took the fancy of Italy
as to make a rule and an example for centuries. Your Italian
house-decorator to-day is fairly able to make you a design of _putti_,
dolphins, and garlands after the manner of the fifteenth-century. The
child in question has become a kind of repeating pattern, and he owes
his long life in art, through high times and decadent, to a love of the
beauty of children that was an incomplete love, or one might rather say
a love that filled completely the capacities of a somewhat shallow
heart—like, _d’ailleurs_, some Italian music. Yet it is to Ghirlandajo
that we owe one of the most direct and sincere children of that time or
the times following, one of the best children of Tuscan art, whom Parma,
Rome, nor Bologna was to match. This is the child who loves the
bottle-nosed man in Ghirlandajo’s beautiful picture, a charming child
exceedingly urgent yet gentle, with the little childish upper lip out,
and the lower lip soft. The man loves him, and is a sweet old man, as
gentle as the boy, and the two profiles turn to each other, records of a
tenderness certainly alive four hundred years ago. In his noble
“Adoration of the Kings” (Chapel of the Innocenti, Florence), with its
glorious company of visitors at the shed of the Nativity, and its great
animated landscape of river and mountains, Ghirlandajo has made the
unusual introduction of two little boys amongst the worshippers. They
seem to be little Florentines rather than little angels, and each kneels
meekly on both knees. Saint John the Baptist brings one, and a bearded
Saint whom I do not recognize brings the other. The same master treats
“The Espousals” as a festival ceremony under the arches of a great
palace court. With all possible simplicity and gravity he deals with the
grotesque incident of the spite of Mary’s rejected suitors—an incident
that seems to have been added to the tradition by the busy fancy of
painters; for many of them represent it: one of the young men, in the
extremity of his disappointment, deals Saint Joseph a hearty blow on the
head at the moment of the marriage benediction. What is to the present
purpose is that Ghirlandajo gives a kind of under-plot to his
composition by the brisk movement of children. A little girl whisks,
much excited, into the picture with her mother, to see the wedding; two
other little girls run in from the other side.
[Illustration:
_D. Anderson_
GHIRLANDAJO. OLD MAN AND CHILD
(LOUVRE)
]
Young if not infantine angels are in the picture by Leonardo da Vinci
and Verrocchio—a beautiful detail of which is detached here. The heads
are lovely and noble, the nearer all-eloquent, with sweetness, eagerness
and tranquillity at once in the expression—the “countenance”—of all the
mobile features, the quick mouth and the eyes a little caught up with
dramatic impulse of feeling. (It is this angel that is judged to be
Leonardo’s most certain share in the picture.) If the first young
creature is hardly a child, the second angel is younger, as he is also
graver. Both are in a profound and tender ecstasy, but the angelic
nature differs, as though these were children indeed, and had their
human inheritance of character. Both are loving and both are
intellectual, but the elder resembles the loving seraphim, and the
younger the wise cherubim, as the Doctors of the Church divided them.
The Florentine painters were theologians one and all.
Among Leonardo da Vinci’s innumerable and admirable designs is the head
of a child, here reproduced, beautiful in drawing, with the solid of the
round cheek and the strong lines of the curved eyelids. The master’s
hand has so carefully followed the thin curls of soft hair in this study
from life, that a writer on the spiral forms of art and nature has
attempted to give unlooked-for significance to those touches. Nay, he
sees in one or two spiral curls on the middle forehead, where a baby’s
scanty hair is a little thicker, evidence that Leonardo da Vinci built
the spiral staircase at Amboise. However this may be, here is a child’s
head that is indeed a child’s, childish in such observed details as the
fullness over the upper eyelid, and the infantine parody of the line of
age beneath the under; purely a baby’s head, untouched by the
fifteenth-century prejudice, and we know that it is thus untampered with
because it is only a head, and goes no further. Were there so much as a
line to indicate the shoulders!—nay, it is easy to draw, in fancy, the
suggestion of shoulders turned aside in the fifteenth-century manner, in
an attitude at odds with the character of the face not many months old.
Amongst Leonardo da Vinci’s Bambini there is one to whom the master has
manifestly intended to present the lowliest homage of extreme old age.
This is the child-Christ of his “Adoration of the Kings” at the Uffizi.
There is the customary twist and curve of adult and conscious elegance,
and the Child shares it with his mother, but the group is a lovely one.
At the feet of the Virgin the Wise Men are prostrate; one,
white-bearded, kisses the green grass; another, crouching, raises
himself on one hand to offer his gift of gold; and this the Child
stretches a hand to touch in sign of acceptance.
[Illustration:
_Alinari_
ANDREA VERROCCHIO, AND LEONARDO. ANGELS FROM “THE BAPTISM OF CHRIST”
(Detail)
(The foremost figure probably painted by Leonardo)
(FLORENCE)
]
It would be too rash to question the change of attribution whereby the
“Christ disputing with the Doctors,” in the National Gallery, has been
withdrawn from Leonardo da Vinci and given to Luini. Yet, questions of
execution apart, those doctors to the right have much of the Leonardo
caricature, the short profile in particular. And an inexpert but
observant eye may see Leonardo da Vinci also in the smoothness and
relief; in the type of the figure of Christ, too, the master’s design
and his taste look well-known. But whoever painted this once famous
picture, having to paint the Saviour at twelve years old, was not
content with that age, but added some years. Dramatically, the figure is
lacking, but lacking in the manner to which the work of masters has
accustomed us. Often do the dramatic Italian hands fail us in their work
in the schools, and nowhere do they fail us more languidly than in the
hands they painted. The merest wayside theatre in Italy shows us the
living language of the hands; yet the painter of “Christ disputing with
the Doctors” has devised no better action for a disputant than this of
checking off arguments in order, with the fingers of the right hand upon
the fingers of the left. There is no weaker presentation of a course of
reasoning. But the National Gallery has now a Leonardo da Vinci of
somewhat more authority, a variant of the picture in the Louvre, the
“Madonna of the Rocks.” The sweetness of the two children here is
perhaps the best character that the master intended to bring about in
any Christ or Saint John known to be his. The little Baptist prays with
folded hands, kneeling, as no young child ever knelt in life, upon one
knee. The Madonna draws him prettily nearer, with her hand on his
shoulder, to her own Child, who gives him the benediction. A young angel
attends on the child-Christ, and in the French picture points to the
praying Saint John.
The nearest in order of chronology to Leonardo da Vinci is Filippino
Lippi, but this great and exquisite master is nearer to Sandro
Botticelli in genius. We know that Botticelli was his protector and
friend, and somewhat like his elder brother, inasmuch as both learnt of
the younger man’s father, Fra Filippo. The bonds of the three in their
art are signs full of interest, not only for the modern measuring expert
student, but for the plainer pilgrim in the galleries. They loved alike
the half-grown angel who may barely enter this book’s company of
children. Their Saint John the Baptist is much of the same age, and
sometimes may not be known amongst them but by his camel’s hair and the
long light rod of his distinctive cross. Filippo, Botticelli, Filippino,
and he who painted the National Gallery full-face Madonna, and he again
who painted the lovely profile Virgin, so long called a Botticelli, in
the Louvre, designed the same full bow-mouth, the same somewhat heavy
hair, but hair with life in its spring from the head and in the slight
final curl of the several locks. And the eyes are not large, under
eyelids that withdraw beneath the fullness of the orbit and the
high-uplifted eyebrows, and the glances are sidelong and most charming
and candid. Filippino Lippi did not generalize his companies of men, or
make them resemble each other; he distinguished, intently, head from
head amongst the old, but these angels and their friend the tender
Baptist are like one another in the sweetness of their touching beauty
on the fine edge of gaiety and sadness. Filippino designed now the
shorter face, with wider-parted eyes, of his father’s pictures, and now
the narrower and longer form of his friend’s choice, though always with
the eyebrows much above the eyes. Notwithstanding this variation, there
is rather a monotony of beauty in these groups of full-lipped young
creatures, tranquilly animated, with their obsequious eyes bent on the
child-Christ, or glancing softly aside into the world or into the
heavens, to see whether men or seraphim are aware of his greatness. In
the detail from the lovely picture in the Pitti Palace, which shows a
fair-haired angel dropping rose-leaves, the Saint John is much the
youngest of the heavenly children. A little of the camel’s hair on his
shoulder and his long cross mark him; he is quick and childlike,
dark-haired and dark-eyed, and his locks are somewhat wilder than those
of the angels, who are very trimly combed. The minister of rose-petals
wears, besides his beautiful wings, a glorious and elaborate dress; the
little downward-gazing one has sleeves of his pattern, the aureoles are
transparent but delicately patterned. In the group of two companion
angels, with the springing hair, a gentle difference of character in
seraph and cherub resembles that of Leonardo da Vinci’s and Verrocchio’s
pair. If we may place these delicate boys in the company of children, we
cannot count the Archangel in those ranks. Gabriel, though but a
celestial year or so more advanced in age than the young comrades of
Saint John, is a grown angel. Filippino Lippi’s Gabriel is an energetic
and most beautiful messenger, not so impetuous as Titian’s, who comes in
at a run, with fleet foot, open wing, arm aloft, and flying apparel,
under a bursting cloud, to a Virgin overwhelmed. Filippino’s announcing
angel is tranquil, but his action is direct and full of power. This is
one of the Saint Gabriels of art who kneel to the kneeling Mary.
[Illustration:
_Filippino Lippi, Pinx._ _Walker & Cockerell Ph. Sc._
_From a painting of the Holy Family._
_(Pitti Palace, Florence)_
]
[Illustration:
_Alinari_
LORENZO DI CREDI. MADONNA AND CHILD WITH ANGELS
(ROME)
]
Filippino’s angels in his great Cistercian picture, “The Vision of Saint
Bernard,” are young; their stature is more childish than the character
of their heads, and they are moreover bent, so that the erect figure of
Mary may have a foil. They share something of the commonplace of angelic
beauty, as the rocks under which Saint Bernard sits writing at a rustic
desk have the commonplace of an unobserved nature, being designed by the
hand of a man who never cared to see a rock or a wayside stone as it is.
The chief beauty of this work is in the tender and majestic figure and
countenance of Saint Bernard. It is perhaps worth noting that in drawing
his angels on a moderately small scale Filippino Lippi followed, with
his later feeling, a convention of his predecessors, who frankly varied
the scale of their figures. I have not called certain companies of
angels children, because they were rather small than young, designed to
give dignity to a great Madonna. They have no part in this volume.
Lorenzo di Credi’s gentle designs have their differences amongst the
works of other minor Florentines of the second half of the
fifteenth-century, but those differences, though visible, are not easily
to be described. He seeks for all possible expression in his young
angels, expression of devotion and sweetness, and places a
representative of the impetuous seraphim and of the thoughtful cherubim
on either side of a tranquil Mother and Child: young angels of fourteen,
small-headed, and on a small scale. Lorenzo di Credi’s variants of these
well-known creatures are sleeker and more smooth than others. Though a
Florentine citizen and the pupil of a Florentine, he is even less
distinctively Tuscan than Leonardo da Vinci, who was his fellow-pupil in
Verrocchio’s workshop.
[Illustration:
_Rosso, Pinx_ _Walker & Cockerell Ph. Sc._
_Angels._
]
Younger, more childlike, and nearer to nature than the young adolescent
angels of contemplation are the little musicians. They are less smooth,
more active, and busy with their strings. The players and singers of the
earlier masters produced their music with an angelic ease and
carelessness of method; but the child of the later school is industrious
and able. He is the pleasant fiction of a day in which simple action had
begun to amuse or attract the painter’s eye, in which the pencil paused
with pleasure upon the way of a player with a lute and the incidents of
the fingering. To feign the musicianly activity of a little child, to
bend a babe’s hand to the strings or to put his small mouth to the
recorders, was a game that pleased the fifteenth-century in Italy; it
was such a mixture of realism and miracle as took the fancy of the time.
One is reminded of the distant, different northern fancy, the mixing of
observed fact with a pathetic convention in the insanity of the tragic
stage, the sweetness of an innocent intelligence astray, the favour and
the prettiness of the distracted woman. Carpaccio, Bellini, Bonifazio
Veronese, Fra Bartolommeo, Frate Antonio the Olivetan, Rosso Fiorentino,
are but a few of the painters, major and minor, who have put instruments
into these infant hands; gross hands of natural-unnatural _putti_ are
some of them, and some again are animated with an eager grace. Frate
Antonio gives to one fleshly babe (standing with one bent leg, for
elegance) a triangle, and to another a flute; Bonifazio puts a large
lute into the round arms of a winged musician; Raphael (in the “Madonna
del Baldacchino” at the Pitti Palace) gives to two corpulent little
boys, in attitudes both adult and effeminate, a scroll to sing from;
Rosso gives us a sudden delight in the impetuous head of his
_angioletto_ with the cheek pressed upon the lute, the mouth close to
the strings, the wings erect and the wild hair; Fra Bartolommeo makes
his beautiful winged boy, in the cathedral at Lucca, a singer to his
lute; Carpaccio’s middle child in the “Presentation of Christ,” one of
the loveliest figures in Venetian art, is intent upon his lute.
Fra Bartolommeo’s boy is as much unlike a human child as might be one of
the fifteenth-century heavenly choir, no more. He is not grown up, but
has an alien felicity and sweetness in his beautiful eyes and in his
majestic action. Here is expression, and here is a childish abundance
fairly accordant with nature at her richest. Fra Bartolommeo, the
Dominican successor of Fra Angelico after nearly a hundred years, is
generally of a cold nature; his nobility of composition has a look of
unheavenly state. He does not stoop, it is true, to the demonstrative
and obvious dignities and graces practised sometimes by greater masters
in the “late” period of Florentine art about to set in when he was
painting. His design is too haughty for that consciousness, but the
haughtiness is somewhat mundane. His work does not make that grave
appeal to tenderness of which all art before the latter half of the
_quattrocento_ was full—architecture, sculpture, painting, music—or at
any rate we in our day think it to have been thus full, and take upon
ourselves the reply of sensibility. If we were children we should call
him “grand,” with the protest implied in that childish word. When we
were young, he seemed the most unsympathetic of the masters of the great
time; and the English pre-Raphaelites doubtless renounced him as flatly
as any master one could name. Yet, for all the chill, for all the
gesture, for all his entirely adult spirit, he could design so beautiful
a natural thing as this minstrel child. It is not a figure of the divine
beauty of Carpaccio’s angel also playing his instrument in the
foreground of a Mystery; and the difference is one evidently of genius
or inspiration; but short of the wilder and simpler loveliness of the
Venetian’s child, the Florentine’s is a noble creature.
[Illustration:
_Houghton_
ROSSO. ANGEL PLAYING THE LUTE (Detail)
(FLORENCE)
]
[Illustration:
_Houghton_
FRA BARTOLOMMEO. ANGEL
(LUCCA)
]
Thus far these Tuscan children have been designed by “pre-Raphaelites”;
for the arbitrary incompleteness of the definition which the name
expresses is proved by the inclusion of Michelangiolo in those ranks.
But Andrea del Sarto was a Florentine painter born next after the
Umbrian master who was to leave so much corruptible, if not corrupt, in
the art of Italy. Andrea del Sarto improves on the graceful game played
by so many Florentines with the soft nude figures of the two children at
the knees of their mothers, Mary and Elizabeth. If the former Italian
painters had rounded the gesture, and bent the knee, and turned aside
the head, his design was yet more curved and facile. It was yet more
manifestly the design of the “sentimentalist,” to use a modern word not
very handsome in form, but necessary now that we have begun to unmask
and expose the character. In painting, the sentimentalist, all
preoccupied with the _banalité_ of his own device, had neither sight nor
insight of incomparable nature. Sentimental without sensibility, he kept
unwarmed the secret coldness and unmoved the obscure hardness of the
sentimental heart.
For, watching thus the artificial attitude rehearsed by generation after
generation of painters, I doubtless have dwelt too much upon the sin of
commission in those who attributed to little children these graces,
these rounded elbows, and these legs placed like those of a club-man
standing to talk before a stroll. But assuredly it is the graver offence
of omission—“Ye did it not”—wherewith we have chiefly to charge the
Italians. They would not see the unconscious child, “the poor child at
his play,” as Henry Vaughan says, or the wayside nursling as he looked
every day, plain to be seen; they not only devised, but they neglected;
gave no attention to that simple and abundant beauty, that straight
aspect and direct gesture of innumerable children; and inasmuch as they
did it not to the least of these, they did it not to the Child painted
in a thousand pictures upon the Virgin’s knees.
PORTRAITS
Nevertheless, another painter born after Raphael, a sixteenth-century
painter who nearly closed the Florentine school—Bronzino—restores the
love of the nature of childhood, that had been habitually a little
falsified after the days of the Della Robbias and before his own.
Bronzino virtually restored in Florence the portraiture of children;
giving, as he did, the name of the child to a ceremonial portrait in the
apparel of the day, he may be said to have been the first explicit
portraitist of little boys and girls; for Desiderio da Settignano, Luca
della Robbia, Jacopo della Quercia, and the rest of that all-noble
company changed the name, while they studied the incidents of the face,
of a living child. They named the boy Saint John the Baptist, but
Bronzino gives him a more personal as well as a lesser dignity, takes
from him the heavenly and gives him the courtly honours. While Desiderio
da Settignano modelled the oval of a soft cheek, and showed to the light
of all these centuries how two weak lips met, and how the whole face of
one Florentine child was made, that child’s name passed into the
innumerable multitude of names forgotten upon earth. But now Bronzino,
after many years, stepping aside from the convention of the Holy Family
that prevailed in his own art of painting, names a likeness; and at once
we acknowledge a fellow-creature. The portrait of a boy in the National
Gallery is one of a long series of portraits of children. Noble patrons
seem to have finally forgotten, at this time—full sixteenth-century—the
early scruple that prevented the portraiture of the living and
individual face, except by way of devotion in order to recommend to
Heaven the soul that was lodged in such or such a body; and the body was
meekly drawn, whether subdued by a small scale or subdued by plain
raiment; in either case in profile, with joined hands, looking to the
Saint or contemplating the Mystery, never turning faces and jewels to
the world, and implying no respect on the part of the painter or of the
donor to the history, character, or date of the person. Such a scruple
of humility did exist, but gave way by degrees, for Andrea del Sarto,
Franciabigio, and Ghirlandajo, in Florence (as well as Titian and
Raphael without), painted portraits. Francia, in Bologna, painted
children’s portraits. In Bronzino’s figures we have at once the patent
personality, and the assertion of the importance of the name, the year,
the circumstance. The picture of Eleonora da Toledo, at the Uffizi,
having all the tranquillity of countenance that was held to comport with
the nobility of portraiture, has yet an expressive action, inasmuch as
the mother has her hand on the shoulder of the child a certain passage
of whose life she desired to record, and he has his foreshortened little
hand on the rich dress in which she sits encased in state. So rested the
hand of Cowper on the English flowers of a flimsier dress than this
magnificent _broccato_, one worn by his own mother. The likeness of
child to mother, especially the resemblance of eyes and eyebrows, is one
of those human incidents of which the record touches us; the mere simple
fact is close to one of the sources of the “tears of things.”
[Illustration:
_Anderson_
ANDREA MANTEGNA. FAMILY OF LODOVICO GONZAGA (Detail)
(MANTUA)
]
With Bronzino, art in Florence enters on a new century; so does Italy.
Fathers and mothers desired that their children’s own childhood should
be remembered, and not merely childhood at its best. It is worth noting
that with the portraiture of children, the exaggerated grace is allowed
to rest, at any rate for the purpose of the moment. The painter is
persuaded, by the erect and forthright aspect of a living child before
him, to leave his tricks of posture aside, or to give them up to the
children of holier families than the best of the Florentine. The boy
whose portrait is painted is straight, or full-face, upright, thickset,
quite inapt to bend or glance or in any way to copy the ideal of
sweetness so habitual in Italian design. And with this fidelity to the
square shape of nature comes a certain severity of design, or rather of
composition, which makes it seem strange that Bronzino the
portrait-painter should be a pupil and successor of painters of the most
ideal boys. Nature is more rigid than Italian design of the
fifteenth-century and onward; for whereas the linear arts elsewhere and
at another time may be thought stiffer than life, in the country and the
age that were ripening for Raphael they were more lax and easier, more
_coulant_ and unbraced, and therefore soon to be more inelastic and
sickly, than life. Elegance and ease of posture in design run that risk
of dullness which awaits rhetoric in literature. When rhetoric has been
strained too much and too often its language looses elasticity; loses
the sensible flexion and tension that are welcome in the using; loses
the friction, friction of air to the pinion or of water to the oar, that
makes the using worth while. Relaxed imagery, or hyberbole, or literary
violence of any kind, is all too easy, as was the task of drawing water
in a sieve, assigned to the daughters of Danaus. We must pity them, not
because their work was hard, but because it was light. And so it is with
the Italian painters and the relaxed ideal they so long abused.
[Illustration:
_Alinari_
TITIAN. PORTRAIT
(VENICE)
]
Moreover, taking the suggestion of portraiture and its honest action,
and looking through the years and centuries before Bronzino, we glean
here and there a slight accessory figure, an incident in a composition,
which is childlike and looks solitary. An example much to the point is
Jacopo da Pontormo’s “Joseph and his Kindred in Egypt” at the National
Gallery. Here are the _putti_, ambiguous as usual, turning and running
in the way of Italian art; and here are in the midst two little boys who
are little boys such as humanity bears, children turning the way they
look and supplying no antithesis of the movement of limbs and head. The
boys, in fact, have been fighting; they are apart from the fluent good
and unclothed children; they wear street clothes and have less good
manners. They are possibly the first street boys of painting. Now this
group from the life is small and unnoticeable, but it has the sincerity
of portraiture; and, in effect, we find one of the two figures to be,
conjecturally at least, a portrait, and the portrait of Bronzino himself
as a boy! Again, in that very beautiful little picture, also in the
National Gallery, Ercole de’ Roberti’s “Israelites gathering Manna in
the Wilderness,” there is a stray infant not on artistic duty, a little
by-way child, quite insignificant except to the eye looking for life, a
little thing, as far as it goes a portrait; and distantly akin to
another by-way child, one of the most perfect children of any of the
schools—Rembrandt’s wonderful little spectator in his National Gallery
“Nativity.” This last looks over, leaning, at the Child lying in the
light, and the light shows us his own most beautiful and touching person
and the exquisite folded hands. What other painters did by rote, or with
habitual intention, Rembrandt did with actual intention. And there is no
surer sign of that immeasurable superiority of spirit and truth than the
power and peace of this mere action of looking-on, the action of a
child, under the touch of that incomparable genius. Dramatic, instant,
unconscious, and perfectly simple is the attitude of that little boy,
brought thither by the shepherds, leaning on his hands. And Rembrandt
leads him into the company of this volume; but he is an alien in this
Italian society.
One of the noblest of portrait groups by one of the noblest
masters—Mantegna’s picture of the “Family of Lodovico Gonzaga”—has the
portraits of two children at the majestic mother’s knee. The girl is at
play; the boy, with his father’s hands on his shoulders, has
extraordinary beauty of drawing and expression.
[Illustration:
_Tiberio Titi. Pinx._ _Walker & Cockerell Ph. Sc._
_Infant Prince Leopoldo._
]
[Illustration:
_Alinari_
TITIAN. CHILDREN OF CHARLES V.
(ROME)
]
Portraits of children are found also amongst the Venetians of the great
time, for in Venice the great time was late enough to give effect to so
much of the pride of life as delights in portraiture, and so much of the
personal love of children as desires the portraiture of sons and
daughters. It is to be supposed that patriarchal love of children, such
as consoled the heart of Job with latter offspring for the former
destroyed in their youth, would not have thought of portraits. Some
centuries of decline from such simplicity brought about the portraits
painted by a little Greek artist for the tombs of Fayum in the second
century, and the art of portraiture seems often to comfort or flatter
some phases of national decadence. (Has not nearly this been said also
of music?) In Venice, in Spain, and in Holland, during the
sixteenth-century in the first nation and during the seventeenth-century
in the two following, there were great exceptions to such a rule.
Titian, Velazquez, and Rembrandt were no flatterers or soothers, nor
were their times poor. But Reynolds, though a great painter, painted in
no great century. The truth may be simply that portraits are “late,” and
that late art in Rome, in Florence, and everywhere in Italy except only
in Venice, is art that has lost irrecoverable things. In Venice,
corruption was prevented by colour and tone. While colour lasted in its
plenitude it borrowed the health of the golden sun, and the art it
filled with life could not die or see corruption. That Titian, being a
great portrait-painter, is a great portrait-painter of children might be
held on the strength of one lovely picture only. This is the beautiful
detail from the Pesaro portraits—the head in three quarters. And this is
the portrait of one old enough to be treated with the dignity of the
Titian quality. Titian, like Michelangiolo, was a painter of the adult,
and this one young creature whose face he has drawn so finely and in
whose eyes he has lodged so much power and peace, is adolescent. In the
portraits, also in Venice, of the two little sons of Charles V., the
master has sought to give the childish interest; but these two boys of a
great Emperor, made to hold their fruits, and a real sword as a toy, so
that they may look infantine, are obviously placed there as princes.
Unequal in height by a bare year, they are fellow-upholders of the state
of a court. Doubtless the technical critic would find the minimum of
Titian’s beauty in this group, as also in the portrait of the little
daughter of Roberto Strozzi, at Berlin. Here is that rare subject of
art, an infant girl, and Roberto Strozzi had wished to have his girl
painted in her simplicity. The child is not on courtly duty, nor clothed
like a duchess; her hair is short and undressed, her ornaments are
simple, and she has her dog.
Titian’s pupils, moreover, painted the portraits of children, amongst
them Paris Bordone, who leaves us the delightful picture of a boy in a
plumed cap, now at the Uffizi, a portrait once named; the accidents of
time have stripped it of its name and title, so that the little
soft-faced child, dressed with so much pretty dignity for the sitting,
appears in the catalogues as a “_giovane ignoto_”—the unknown youth
being about eight years old, his cheeks not yet narrowed from their
childish round. An unconfessed smile, forbidden to his dark eyes, is
lodged in the infantine mouth and chin. Paris Bordone was the
contemporary of Titian, Tintoretto, and Palma Vecchio, and therefore
belonged to the greatest time of Venetian painting; Palma Giovane and
Paolo Veronese were, by a score or two of years, of a later, more
artificial, and less vigorous genius. Tiburio de’ Titi was employed to
make the portrait of the infant Leopoldo da Modena, in the beginning of
the seventeenth-century, and painted the baby in the modern spirit. The
little boy with his counted dimples lies cushioned and covered with
embroidered silks, the hands and the feet shown as a nurse would have
them.
[Illustration:
_Boraccio Pinx._ _Walker & Cockerell Ph. Sc._
_Infant Prince Federigo._
]
[Illustration:
_Alinari_
PARIS BORDONE. PORTRAIT OF A BOY
(FLORENCE)
]
Later than Bordone, and not so late as Tiburio de’ Titi, is Baroccio,
one of the many painters born at Urbino, but too modern a man to be
affiliated to any local school, even when the metropolitan _locus_ of
Raphael is in question. By the time that Baroccio had gained courage to
place a child quite erect, quite full-face, in the charm of its own
ways, and in the simplicity of childish action, art had lost much. The
loss ought not to cause us to despise the gain, which is a gain of
dignity and not of trivial charm. It makes for the dignity of art and of
the little son of man that his likeness should be designed honestly, and
without fictitious graces. Yet the noblest time of art used these
fictitious graces, and the less noble time respected the noble nature.
History shows us many such paradoxes; for example, music underwent
irrevocable losses when she made her profoundest discoveries. Some
genius of the single note vanished when harmonies were found.
SIENA AND UMBRIA AND OUTLYING SCHOOLS
When Siena came out of the _bassi tempi_, she grew for a short time side
by side with Florence. She was not Florentine, but she was Tuscan. The
evolution from the Byzantine took place in the sister cities at much the
same date, but with a difference. Pietro Lorenzetti, for some years
probably a contemporary of Cimabue, struggled out of the bonds with a
different gesture. And the dissimilarity is manifest in the wonderful
figure of a child. In the painting of the Madonna, with the Infant
Christ between Saint John and Saint Francis, in the lower church at
Assisi, Lorenzetti shows us surely the earliest example of intent,
instant expression. The Mother looks close into her Child’s eyes, and
Christ gives the Pontifical benediction to Saint Francis, in obedience
to the Virgin’s sign. The drawing is still quite arbitrary and
irresponsible in such matters as the placing of the Child on the
Mother’s fore-arm; the little figure is vacant of weight and substance;
and, though the perspective of the three faces in three quarters has
been courageously attempted, the eyes have still the Byzantine length;
the hands are, by the usual anomaly, altogether undramatic and
inexpressive; only on the English stage can we find any hand so inexpert
as in early Italian art—always excepting the extraordinary and untimely
genius of the sculptors. And the whole design is as it were tied up in
bands of anxious inexperience. But, fettered as it is, the pencil is
strong in its constraint. And in this one figure of the Child the great
genius of expression, destined to perturb the heart of all the human
arts; to strike with a tremor for a thousand weak distresses that
literature which had told unshaken and unappealing the despair of Cain
and the Crucifixion of the Lord; to break the voice of that music which
had steadfastly sung the Good Friday liturgies; to move the arts of
design from their tranquillity so as to make even of portraiture a kind
of familiarity and confidence to the passer-by; to make the statue the
image of the hour, and even to weaken the walls of architecture; the
genius of expression, I say, seems to make nearly its first appeal in
this momentous painting of a child. Pietro Lorenzetti has made the
action, as well as the look, expressive. He has set aside the habit of
ceremonial attitude in order to raise the child’s head and to direct the
speech of this energetic mouth. Amongst the many beginnings of modern
art—as many as the scattered sources of one large river—here, in the
prophetic painting of the Sienese master, is one.
[Illustration:
_Alinari_
PIETRO LORENZETTI. MADONNA AND CHILD (Detail)
(ASSISI)
]
Matteo di Giovanni, called also Matteo da Siena, is of a century and a
half later, and the Bambini of his paintings have in some examples the
affectation that all the Italian schools of the noblest ages shared
amongst them and in a measure taught in time to Germany and Flanders.
Moreover with him the “fineness” (to use the word in its strange
corruption), the fineness of the “fine child,” his superlatively good
physical estate, is in an extreme form, as in the case of the picture in
the Palazzo della Signoria, now called the Palazzo Comunale, at Siena.
But, again, we find a little movement observed from life in the
Accademia picture; the poor and puerile drawing of a work full of noble
feeling yet served the painter in his desire to give something of
childhood, besides fat, to the weak but thriving limbs. In another
Accademia painting, in which the Child holds a string of beads, it is
not only the action but the expression that has natural vitality. It is
simple, and we have seen, amongst a multitude of Bambini, how rare is
simplicity in the dealings of art with the figure of childhood. The
naturally parted lips have evidently been watched in a living child. In
this picture, too, there is a curious group of angels some ten years
old, all unchildish in the artificial employment of their hands; and yet
for these, four children of Siena may have been the models, for they
have character, and it is doubtless in obedience to the painter’s
commands that one of them holds his head too much on one side.
[Illustration:
_Matteo di Giovanni Pinx._ _Walker & Cockerell Ph. Sc._
_Virgin and Child with Angels._
(_Accademia, Siena_)
]
[Illustration:
_Alinari_
LUCA SIGNORELLI. THE CORONATION OF S. CECILIA (Detail)
(CITTA DI CASTELLO)
]
Clear, in all these devotional and beatific groups, is the anxious
preoccupation of the pencil in search as eager as a child’s for beauty
of face and figure. The painters of the centuries of art and religion
had no other wish than to paint something beautiful; the objects of
their adoration and admiration were held to possess all beauty possible
to men and angels. They had no dealings with creatures imperfect and
marred, or subject to the waste of accident or crime. The devils were
invested with every sign of evil imaginable by the mind of man so many
centuries old and Italian, and their unhandsome figures introduced into
the very rare pictures that admitted them; but, apart from these,
everything less than beautiful and less than innocent was banished and
cast out. Until the portrait came to be more practised, when that which
modern feeling holds to be the best time of art—the time of the flower
rather than of the fruit—had passed by in the perpetual movement of
human things; until men began to desire their own storied faces and the
presage of their children’s faces to be secured in painting, there was
not so much as the incident of personality to engage the painter; he had
not the differences of the multitudes of the living to respect. He was
always bent on drawing a beautiful woman and a beautiful child;
secondarily beautiful angels, and next beautiful martyrs, virgins, and
evangelists. Saint Joseph was to be beautiful in age and Saint Sebastian
in youth. The fact that these centuries of living art were intent upon
the contemplation of moral good is perhaps too manifest to capture our
attention; we know the fact, and pass on; that fact would be wonderful
if only it were strange, for to this habit the custom of our own age has
no likeness. As steadfast as the morality was the beauty of the
aspiration common to all painters during five hundred years. But the
sincere spectator has to confess that the pencil, the hand, the eye, the
invention did not thoroughly serve the will. Matteo di Giovanni and his
contemporaries of all the schools intended to paint the most beautiful,
and the prettiest, faces they could by any means achieve. For fear of
loss of beauty they dared not forego anything of the prescription—the
long oval for a woman’s face with the arched eyebrows high above the
eyeball, and for a child abundant flesh. The sense of some failure in
the effect of this patient observance of the inventory of beauties has
obviously discouraged a master now and then. He was far too simple to
dread the name of prettiness, and he was sorry to miss it; missing it,
he sought at any rate for grace.
In the church of Santo Spirito, also in Siena, there is, attributed to
Matteo Balducci, a curious Tuscan picture—it is, if he is the painter,
Florentine, nevertheless it has something of the outlying provincial
manner in design and in the character of his Madonna’s face. The painter
surrounds the seated figure, rising from the symbolical tomb, with the
_mandorla_ of winged angel-heads, children frankly drawn from life, with
a careful variety of attitude. These little bodiless ones are a
characteristically Italian version of the prophet’s angels, each with
six wings—“With twain he covered his face, and with twain he covered his
feet, and with twain he did fly.” Italian art gives this angel no feet,
but crosses the lower twain of his wings under the chin, no doubt to
hide the decollation; the twain that should veil the face are open and
erect, for so amiable and so pretty a head is not to be covered, and the
twain that fly have little to do but to carry a strange little monster,
moth-like, on his fluttering way. Nothing could be less ancient and less
Hebrew. The bodiless ones became a commonplace of art, and their
strangeness soon disappeared in tediousness; in all dull art there is
nothing duller, and the little heads flutter, a proverb for absurdity,
and with the last inappropriateness, on the tombstones of the
eighteenth-century. One cannot easily believe that they were at any time
really interesting, and yet Matteo Balducci almost persuades us that he
liked them. This picture of his has, besides the six-winged heads, four
entire child-angels, winged like the commonalty of heaven; two wearing
the ribbons of Italian taste and running, each upon a piece of cloud;
and two standing as little guards before the vacant tomb, one rather
prettily alert, the other in an adult attitude of meditation which—one
would think—might strike even the simplest spectator as insincere. Saint
Francis on one side and Saint Catherine of Siena on the other
contemplate the mystery of the Assumption, and in the distance is an
ingenious landscape of coast and winding reaches of the sea. Triviality
and gravity, both of a kind alien to our thoughts, divide this design,
and many a remotely Oriental composition would seem nearer to our
present mind, more intelligible and interesting.
[Illustration:
_Alinari_
PINTURICCHIO. ST. JOHN PREACHING
(SIENA)
]
Luca Signorelli, born in another of the steep cities of the hill country
of middle Italy, into which the sun looks as they go up their mountains
by steps—Cortona—was one of the Sistine painters, but his best works are
at Orvieto and at Città di Castello. The “Coronation of Saint Cecilia”
is decorated by a number of _putti_ of the conventional kind, playing
with flowers which they hold with a detached little finger _en
minaudant_. At any rate one of them performs this action of Italian
elegance—the dancing-master again!—but another has a fresher and truer
movement as he reaches up to catch a falling rose, for the flowers are
scattered by the hands of the Virgin. Her Child stands on her knee to
crown Saint Cecilia, who wears roses for a wreath, as Tennyson has her,
and carries her organ-pipes and her palm. Crowns like hers lie at the
feet of Saint Catherine of Alexandria and Saint Elizabeth of Hungary.
The expressions of these and of the episcopal and monastic Saints
standing above is unequal—very sweet and still in some instances, and in
others somewhat conventional, strained in the manner that grows tedious
with a tediousness wholly of Latin race, the tediousness of habitual
exaggeration. That habit—exaggeration—has relaxed the whole language of
French religion, for instance; the French paraphrase of the Scriptures
is as it were an instrument with strings so loosened as to be incapable
of music or meaning. If the tense habit can do so much for a language,
it may well overtax an art indifferently vigorous.
In a picture at the Poldi-Pezzoli Gallery, Milan, by the Ferrarese
master Cosimo Tura, or more probably by one of his school, we have at
last three boys who, though nude and symbolical, are neither the _putti_
of the schools nor the angels of a sentimental Italian convention. A
young maternal Charity, seated under a few white horizontal clouds, such
as a tender blue May sky so often bears in Italy, holds a scroll-like
scarf for the rather aimless play of two of the boys, but the third is
really playing at horses with it; he prances and obviously makes a
horsey noise.
[Illustration:
_Alinari_
PINTURICCHIO THE CHILD JESUS AND THE LITTLE ST. JOHN (Detail)
(SIENA)
]
And now Perugia and Urbino become central to the art of Italy.
Pinturicchio, Perugino, and Raphael rule the time, and the time is a
great one. Perugino may not be to us all that criticism held him to be
in the time of reaction against the love of the Carracci—who were the
greatest (as well as the latest) of all the Italians, in the grotesque
opinion of Horace Walpole. On its way back to the older Florentines, the
taste of the dilettante paused upon Pietro Perugino as on a master
comparatively early, tender, spiritual, and candid. It was a higher
thing to admire the recollected and feminine attitude of a saint of his
under a blue sky than the muscular action of a saint of Guercino’s
against a convention of cloud; and the little tree of the Umbrian
background than the gloomy Neapolitan’s twisted forests. And with this
master of Raphael is Raphael’s father, Giovanni Santi, contemporaries
together, and heralds and forerunners of the painter whom nearly all men
love to praise. In relation to children Giovanni Santi seems to be
memorable chiefly by reason of a little girl, a daughter of donors, set
on her knees in front of her father and mother to offer her devotions to
the Bambino of a pale Madonna—a Bambino having nothing remarkable,
granted the time and school. But this little girl in her close cap, who
is evidently there because the pair behind her have no son, is purely
childlike, and kneels, like a child, on both knees, simple and erect,
her hands before her and the soles of her feet behind her, under her
little sombre petticoat. Santi’s angels are much like those of Balducci,
if Balducci it be—winged heads of veritable children making a crown.
Their roundness is here in contrast with the worn and patient Saints, a
wrinkled Saint Francis of Assisi showing his transfixed hands, Saint
John the Baptist hollow-cheeked, Saint John the Evangelist in extreme
old age (we must suppose that the donor’s name is John, like the
painter’s); and Saint Sebastian only of the four is young, and his whole
body is pierced with arrows. Of Perugino’s many Bambini none has more
sweetness than the Child whom a young angel has placed on a cushion so
that the Virgin’s hands, released from their burden, might be folded. To
some charming angel, almost feminine in action, many a master has given
this office, making of the heavenly youth a little nurse for a time, so
that the maternal knees, all day long the throne of Christ, may be bent
and press the earth like those of all mankind. The Child here has the
beauty of a direct look, meeting the Virgin’s eyes, and his hands have
the action of a child; hardly so the boy Saint John with his light cross
against his shoulder, daintily kneeling upon one knee.
It would be hard if in Pinturicchio’s gaiety the children of his
pictures had not their part. And there is actually something cheerful in
the two figures of Christ and Saint John (in the Siena Accademia), the
one in a patterned vestment, the other in his camel’s hair, both with
their feet curiously laced. The attitudes are arbitrary and not
infantine, but there is a smile closed within the face, and especially
within the mouth, of each. In the Città di Castello picture, the young
Saint John has something recalling the sprightly look of a San
Giovannino of Filippo or Filippino Lippi, but at some distance.
Pinturicchio’s gaiety is not quite Florentine; the gentler city had, if
not the lighter heart, the lighter wit, and the Tuscan smile is more
intelligent. Pinturicchio’s is rather a doll-like Bambino in this
beautiful picture, small-headed, but the expression is tender, much more
explicitly and intelligibly tender than is usual in this age. The young
Saint John takes here the benediction of his Lamb.
The same Saint John, grown a man, preaches to a little boy, in the Siena
Cathedral. Pinturicchio, repeating yet once more the ever-unintelligible
failure of the fifteenth-century Italian to make any Saint do what he
himself could not but do—give his hands vivacity to carry a meaning—can
think of nothing better than that poor ineptitude of gesture I have
already mentioned; his Baptist convinces the audience before him,
including the little boy, by counting his reasonings and proofs on his
left fingers with his right. See how unable are also the other hands,
and how ineloquent; a young man lifts one hand in the gesture wherewith
the whole art of Italy wearies us, and the boy crosses his two hands
over his breast, not child-wise. But there is an unwonted thought in the
placing of this little auditor in the forefront, for he is not a saint
by name, but only a very good Umbrian. In the minds of English people,
doubtless the most conspicuous Pinturicchio child-Christ is the curled
one standing by the prettiest of Madonnas on a carpeted parapet, in the
National Gallery picture. The prettiest she is, with each eye larger
than her mouth, and the Child stands with a kind of Perugino salience of
the hip. His little features are gathered close together under a vast
forehead. But in these two faces, so conventional and rigid in their
beauty, the genius of Pinturicchio and the habit of feeling of the
fifteenth-century have placed sanctity and a remote tranquillity.
[Illustration:
PERUGINO. MADONNA AND CHILD WITH THE LITTLE ST. JOHN
]
As for Mantegna, few infants of his have become the darlings of the
Galleries, but there is something memorable in the slightest of his
designs. The Madonna of one of his drawings, whose long mantle comes
into the foreground with something Flemish in its angular folds, has
laid her Son upon the end of this garment spread upon the ground. He is
the youngest and most helpless of the Children of the Masters, but
Mantegna’s grave hand has moulded with power the powerless bent limbs
and closed hands of the new-born. There is a suggestion of the North in
this figure as well as in the drapery.
RAPHAEL AND AFTER
It is the Raphael of children, and not the whole Raphael, that is in
question here; and any temerity of opinion whereto these pages may bear
witness will for that cause be more easily forgiven. The master whose
name is tender and august, sweet and venerable, in the ears of
generations in all Europe, added this or that to the arts of arrangement
and design, but he rather continued and fulfilled than renewed the
painting of childhood; he certainly did not invent the grace we call
Raphaelesque, for we have seen this misunderstanding and misconception
of childhood persist, before his date, in all the schools of the
peninsula; we have had it by rote, and the formula is known. In Santa
Maria della Pace, in Rome, Raphael has some loves or angels, part of the
fresco of the four Sibyls, figures nobly composed as design, but far
less than noble or natural as studies of children. One, in particular,
may be taken as the representative of the whole convention, and this is
his attitude: he kneels upon one knee, and the other corpulent leg is
bent, and its foot turned out excessively; the body is twisted from the
hip so that—as De Musset’s dancing-master danced—it should contradict
the turn of the foot, and it is also bent abruptly at the waist; and
this twist is wrenched aside again by the turn of the head and neck;
there are five zigzags, or perhaps one should say three zigs and two
zags; and all this elegance performed by a babe for whom those pranks
were never intended, for whose shape they are unfitted, whose mind could
not grasp them, whose spirit they do not express, whose simplicity they
violate, and for whose own honest graces they prove the painter
inventing them to have neither heart nor eye. Raphael was not that
painter, he had no kind of originality in the device, he fell in with
the custom, only carrying it, in this instance of the angel, somewhat
farther; but his was the propaganda which is seldom the inventor’s; he
imposed the formula of grace upon all Europe; he declined upon Canova,
upon Sir Thomas Lawrence, upon the Italian decorator, upon George IV.
True distinction, such as that of Sir Joshua Reynolds—true freshness—was
untouched by that sickly prescription, but nothing inferior escaped it.
It was the rhetoric of the body, it depreciated attitude. Chancing
lately to enter a Chinese temple in San Francisco on a great festival
night, and to see a priest diligently dancing to and fro in front of the
altar of his gods, I had one chief thought. The priest was, unlike the
men of his crowded congregation, a majestic creature, of stature and
spirit, with an oval face flanked narrowly by the long lappets of a fine
headdress. He danced long and fervently, with a whole code of actions
and attitudes altogether alien in our eyes and of unintelligible beauty.
And the chief thought of the European stranger was this—that here was a
grace in which Raphael had no part. Nothing I had ever before seen in
adult public life, nothing in church, street or theatre, on platform, or
on the trapeze, had been so unlike Raphael. There was nothing of Raphael
in the derivation of that elegance, not even the protest against Raphael
whereby the English pre-Raphaelites of the middle of the
nineteenth-century implicitly recognized, while they renounced him. The
Chinese priest was all apart from Raphael, and this was the thing that
struck the traveller—so long, so wide and general is the obsession of
Raphael in Europe, and the dancer from beyond the East and beyond the
West came thus far to prove another lineage.
[Illustration:
_Naya_
ANDREA MANTEGNA. CHERUBS (Detail.)
]
Meantime, nevertheless, there was always the child at home, the Italian
child and the English alike, visibly as free from Raphael as the Chinese
priest. Art, the dance, and the stage might take the sickly pose, but
the child’s body was free. And Raphael himself saw this. He was more
original when he drew children that were not, than when he designed
children that were, Raphaelesque. That is, he saw for himself the grave
childish glance and the huddled position of the Boy of the “Madonna
della Seggiola”; here is no twist of attitude; the head is aside,
indeed, but as nature turns it, and not for the sake of attitude.
Moreover, this is a clasped child, not one touched at the distance, and
with the unconstraining hand and the parted fingers, of Italian grace.
The Madonna of this picture is the most popular of all the master’s
Madonnas, but she is not fine enough to resist the wearying effect of
her scattered fame; her face, often repeated, grows tedious. But the
Boy’s head does not tire our interest and admiration. If we are weary of
the picture, we know that of one part we are not so, and that the
“Madonna della Seggiola” is at once a hackneyed work and a fresh.
[Illustration:
_Raphael Pinx._ _Walker & Cockerell Ph. Sc._
_Angel from the fresco of the four Sibyls_
_(Santa Maria della Pace, Rome)_
]
No less beautiful, and invested in the imaginations of some spectators
with greater nobility, is the Child of the Dresden “Madonna di San
Sisto.” He too is free from the Raphaelesque pose, and the childish
figure bears a head forced not at all from the character of its age by
its look of intellect and power. There is all the quality of a portrait
in that head, with its eyelids folded down at the outer corner—a not
beautiful but not ignoble irregularity wherewith the older masters would
not have had the heart to roughen the features of a little Christ. For
them were the long and fine corners of well-finished eyes. Raphael
probably saw such severe eyelids in a living boy; and in this picture
they make a detail of likeness between the Child and the most worthy of
the master’s Virgins. This young dark-haired woman walks all the ages
and all the spaces, and in some happy hour Raphael set on her arm his
single solemn Child. Only in the arbitrary and not very fortunate puff
of her veil is this beautiful group marred by evident convention. But in
the Saint Barbara kneeling below, in the two angels to whom she smiles,
Raphael turns again to the adulterated feeling of Italy. The two _putti_
have no more than a pretence of natural action—a somewhat deliberate
make-believe in the raised shoulders of the one, the huddled chin and
pushed-up mouth of the other. These _puttini_ are intended to be at
their ease, and in designing them the master has denied himself his
habitual grace; none the more are they true. For beauty and extreme
sweetness—mere sweetness—a foremost babe of Raphael’s is that of the
“Madonna del Cardellino,” who with languishing looks, and the attitude
of a woman, with projected hip and languid leg, caresses the bird
brought to him by a laughing Saint John. And of the _putti_, none are
more artificial than two in the “Madonna del Baldacchino,” who are
singing their parts from a scroll of music. Women’s attitudes again are
theirs, and women’s looks, but the women who should practise these would
be lacking in uprightness and simplicity.
See also the twist of the Bambino of the Foligno Madonna, who turns
shoulders, head, pelvis, knees, and feet in as many directions in a kind
of convulsion of affectation and grace; and the unchildish manner of
standing of the Child in the Louvre picture; all these are Italian
improvements upon a nature unwatched and neglected. The great time of
art is checked in its greatness by this figure of a child mishandled.
That it is not altogether a great time we know by the rebuke, always at
hand, of a living child’s authentic action and incomparable beauty. The
pride of the sixteenth-century is, in this sense, at the mercy of a
photograph.
Close upon Raphael followed the painters of Parma, more fluent, softer,
riper than even he. A reaction against Raphael probably strikes with
still more vigour against Correggio. Yet this last-named has more of the
false elegance in the woman’s action, and less in the child’s. The
smiling mother turns her shoulders and her head, but the Bambino is
often straightforward; thus Correggio tampers with the lesser
simplicity. He is fond of a dainty strife between the baby and the
mother, the one catching at the veil, the other checking the little
hands. For the famous _putti_ of Parma, with their exuberant and
sentimental prettiness, few men with modern feeling can have a warm
admiration. It is a surprise to find Ruskin owning a rich and gay charm
in these frolic children. Whether as pictures of beautiful boys and
angels or as a decoration, is a company of Correggio’s children in their
hide and seek what we would choose for beauty and delight? Were these
happy ends ever attained by means so conscious and so luxurious? We have
learnt, rather, that something more sparing is not only more beautiful,
but more joyous.
[Illustration:
_Houghton_
RAPHAEL. ANGELS, “MADONNA DI S. SISTO” (Detail)
(DRESDEN)
]
[Illustration:
_Alinari_
RAPHAEL. MADONNA “WITH THE GOLDFINCH,” CHRIST AND INFANT ST. JOHN
(FLORENCE)
]
After Correggio the decline comes quickly; and the word “decline” seems
to express but ill the flimsy scattering of genius. For genius grows
thin, light, and cold, and wastes. Parmigiano, aiming at beauty only,
should perhaps have aimed at something loftier or further in order to
hit the swift and incontrollable creature. I cannot think that the
composition of his, held to be most beautiful, does cause the delight
that is the sanction of beauty. This is the group of eight young
figures—“Amorini Scherzanti”—of the picture in the Palazzo Mancini
gallery at Città di Castello. One of the eight is a youth, the others
are little rounded boys; the elder is Love, and the seven play with his
arrows. Nothing could be more purely a work dedicated to loveliness and
pleasure; and yet there is not a figure there but has, in spite of the
action, the movement, the sport of lines, an invincible dullness. It is
not extravagance, it is not excitement, it is not excess, or dizziness,
or delirium, that chastises habitual pleasure in art, but only dullness;
and when children are made the ministers of that habit, the dullness
looks the more foolish. One of the Latin races, having the dullness and
keeping wit enough to name it, has the word for it—_banalité_.
Thus the figure of a child corrects and rebukes. The review of children
in art seems to promise delight and indulgence, but we find in it
various sentences of judgment.
In Rome, where all ornaments are cast into a certain mould, the
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century taste held upright things in so much
dislike that the straightest thing in the world, the chasuble of a
priest, must be caught in a gale, so that it should flutter with folds
like the scarf of a woman. A hurricane would hardly suffice, in fact, to
set flying this rigid Romanesque vestment, but there is no sculpture
where Bernini lets it hang plainly in the attitude for which it was
made. The inappropriate flight is much like the forbidding of the
Italian urchin to stand upon two simple and equal feet.
The word “after” has doubtless more significance when it waits upon the
name of Raphael than in any other of the conditions of the history of
art. To follow Raphael is to follow that which, in certain aspects
great, in certain qualities nobly ideal, in certain examples incorrupt,
was yet in a greater number manifestly and explicitly corruptible.
[Illustration:
_Giovanni Bellini. Pinx._ _Walker & Cockerell Ph. Sc._
_Angel playing the Flute._
]
THE VENETIANS
Venice is not “after” Raphael. Her school is the only school of Italy
that bears to him no such reference. Its date, though later, has none of
the indignity of that sequence. It is true that the natural and
inevitable derivation, the heredity as well as the inheritance, from the
whole national past, helped the genius of the place, the genius of the
East, and the genius of the transalpine North, to make the Venetian art;
but Venice had no part in the general rhythm, the rise and fall. She
kept her own time and walked at her own speed. As her Tintoretto is not
“after” Raphael, her Gentile Bellini is not a pre-Raphaelite.
Moreover, she has this singular favour: that whereas other cities had
one inspiration, held it while it lasted, then remembered it, later
remembered that they had remembered it, and then lost even this “darling
of their widowhead,” regret, and, lacking it, grew fat and cheerful,
Venice received two inspirations. The first was in the time of the
Bellinis, and the second after fifty and more years, when, with the
birth of Titian, colour and tone, in a new sense, and as a new gift to
the Occident, began to warm our world. At the earlier date, as at the
later, Venice was original. No other master of his time was original as
was Giovanni Bellini. But more wonderful is the originality and
illustrious novelty of the late masters of Venice, contemporaries of the
decadent painters of every other city of Italy, from Naples to the Alps;
and it is to the present purpose that we should find the signs of this
fresh and imperial source of life in the painting of childhood.
Giovanni Bellini’s children are unlike those of the Tuscan and the
Roman; if, in his design, he does not attempt to transcend nature,
neither does he see her amiss, or force her. The Divine Child is studied
from the poor infant in the arms of the Venetian woman. She is made
graver and more beautiful than life, arbitrarily beautiful with her long
features, long eyebrows, and full yet delicate cheeks; but the Child is
made simply natural, and less beautiful than pathetic. Pathos had hardly
entered into the Florentine idea of the infancy of Christ, but it is
seldom absent from the Venetian. And this is not said on account of the
art of Giovanni Bellini only; the most pathetic child in our National
Gallery is another Venetian’s—the sleeping Child whose heavy little chin
is propped upon the Mother’s arm in Crivelli’s great gilded and inlaid
picture, in three stages, of the “Virgin and Child with Saints.” In the
midst of the “bearded councillors of God,” flanked by pontiffs, doctors,
and virgins, on the knees of the woman who was clothed with the sun,
lifted over some gold fifteenth-century altar, Crivelli sets a wearied
baby, not only tired but sad with his fatigue, slipping, all unbraced,
with his chin caught up; in the first months of a hard life, weak as a
spent wave, light, but too heavy for his own strength, sheltered from
privation and sickness by the depth of the refuge of sleep. There is
not, of course, the modern appeal of expression; the mother is tranquil,
and the child’s face locked in peace, but the painter gives to the
childish figure all the sadness possible with closed eyes.
[Illustration:
_Alinari_
GIOVANNI BELLINI. ALTAR-PIECE OF S. GIOBBE (Detail)
(VENICE)
]
[Illustration:
_Anderson_
GIOVANNI BELLINI. MADONNA AND CHILD
(VENICE)
]
[Illustration:
_Alinari_
ALVISE VIVARINI (formerly attributed to BELLINI). ANGEL
(VENICE)
]
Bellini also has the Bambino asleep, a beautiful but meagre figure of a
young child with one arm dropped, and something sombre in the depth of
sleep. Here is no _geste arrondi_, the grace is purely nature’s, and it
is lovely beyond the rivalry of artifice; I will not say of art, for an
English wit has well said that affectation displeases us because it has
not too much, but too little, art. Bellini has not been afraid of a
straight arm and a heavy head, and his art is more, not less, than his
Florentine contemporary Verrocchio’s. Furthermore, one may wonder why
Venice alone in Italy did not play the gossip nor boast like a nurse of
the weight of the central child of pictures. Christ is tender, thin, and
delicate in the designs of the Adriatic painters; never more sweet or
more worn than in Giovanni Bellini’s group referred to at the beginning
of this volume. The tender figure is tenderly treated; the little silken
rings of curls—no signs of vigour as with Botticelli or Raphael—are
exquisitely drawn. And it is only when he paints an attendant angel that
the master makes childhood flourish, sleeks the hair, and creases the
wrist. Bellini’s flute-playing winged _putto_ from the Frari picture is
more conventional, but he does not cease to be a child. Nor does
Vivarini’s, long taken for a work of Bellini, the detail of the
beautiful picture in the church of the Redentore, who sings to his lute,
as befits his wings, beyond his years, but has the attitude of a human
child, the only attitude tolerable with limbs so fair and full. Here
also is the Venetian characteristic. And doubtless it is also in that
singular design of Giovanni Bellini’s which is catalogued (at the
Uffizi, Florence) by no more definite name than that of _Un’ allegoria
religiosa_. We see here a landscape full of caves, rocks, steps, and
houses, a landscape into the depths of which the eye may follow Saints
to their business or their solitudes, wayfaring with an ass or in
retreat within a hollow. In the foreground is a well-paved court
inclosed within a white marble balustrade, waist-high. A beautiful
throne is raised to the left for the veiled and enwrapped Virgin, and at
her feet kneels one of the martyr-patronesses—Catherine, Barbara, Agnes,
or Lucy—with flowing hair; a humbler woman-saint, with gathered hair,
stands on the other side of the throne; Saint Paul, Saint Peter, Saint
Sebastian, and Saint Paul the Hermit, or some other anchorite, stand
praying, whilst four children at play have these reverend eyes, and
evidently the reverend thoughts, fixed upon them. They are all _putti_
unwinged; one shakes a little orange-tree growing in a pot in the middle
of the court, and the others catch the oranges, with charming actions,
hold them, and eat them, all absorbed in their pleasure, as are their
holy spectators. Saint Peter especially is intent upon them, holding up
his hands to pray, and the Virgin Mother herself, praying also, seems to
return to them the morning and evening prayers of childhood. There is no
interpreting the allegory. The little boys are symbolical, but they are
also mere boys, and not about the usual business of angels.
[Illustration:
_Alinari_
GIOVANNI BELLINI. AN ALLEGORY
(FLORENCE)
]
[Illustration:
_Alinari_
CARPACCIO. “THE PRESENTATION” (Detail)
(VENICE)
]
Also to Giovanni Bellini’s noble hand do we owe the group of three young
ones—children they are hardly—playing their instruments at the foot of
the Madonna’s chair. Such a group of three was a peculiarly Venetian
gathering of the Society of the Mysteries. The ceremonial passes above—a
New-Testament incident, or merely the enthronement of Mother and Child;
tall Saints stand at either side, and the three, a little under
life-size, and of about the age of Botticelli’s younger angels and
Baptists, sit making music on the unequal steps. In the same Accademia
with this beautiful Bellini is the more beautiful Carpaccio thus
arranged, and other examples of this Venetian group of grace and gravity
are in the memories of all. Carpaccio followed Bellini after some twenty
years, and he evidently followed him in the convention of this trio of
strings. Bellini’s violinist is one of the most youthfully and freely
graceful figures of Italian art—graceful with what innocence of the
postures of the other schools! There is much difference between the
leaning-aside of this most beautiful head and the leaning-aside of a
Roman angel’s. The Venetian youth has a masculine rectitude; and with
this a glance of genius, candid and grave. Where, in Florence, are such
simple eyes? If he were more a child this would be the place to pause
longer upon their significance, and upon the heedless beauty of the soft
and spreading hair.
But between Bellini’s date and Carpaccio’s comes that of Crivelli, a
master of the period that was early for Venice, yet a contemporary of
Mantegna at Mantua and of Verrocchio in Tuscany. Something has already
been said here of Crivelli’s Bambino, the sad Child over-tired. In
another National Gallery picture, the famous “Annunciation,” full of
architecture, there is a glimpse of an inceremonial wayside child; and
for once it is probably a girl. A citizen or two passes on the noble and
narrow ways of the fifteenth-century city. The mystic Dove is coming
upon a beam of light in at a ground-floor palace window; within, Mary
kneels at prayer, and behind her are the flowered curtains of her bed,
its coverlet and pillow, brackets with vases, pots, books, a glass
bottle, a candlestick, a box, and dishes of majolica. Plants are in the
window behind the bars; above the room is a magnificent loggia, and a
peacock sits upon the parapet with a tail sweeping down to the
architrave of the Virgin’s beautiful door. Without, a street leads to an
archway, and beyond lies a stepped garden inclosed by a machicolated
wall. The herald of Heaven, on his knees upon the foreground pavement,
has a twisted feather fastened to the jewel in his cap, a chain of gold,
plumes upon his shoulder, and acanthus-leaves. The young Emidius, Bishop
and patron of Ascoli, seems to interrupt the Archangel in order to
recommend to him the turretted city he holds in his hands. Far off, on
the terrace of the archway, one man reads a paper to another. On some
narrow palace-steps, truly a Venetian little staircase, a gentleman of
the city and two monks hold a conversation. And all this takes a new
animation from the childlike action of a little girl whom that
conversation does not amuse, but who perceives something to be taking
place in the street, and thrusts a curious head, in a cap, round the
staircase balustrade, to look below. How rare, in Italian art, is such a
child. Venice here has a heart for something simple, something serious
as well as slight, and something other than adult and condescending. The
glorious Venetian master has this heart in common with the German and
the Fleming, and with that divine Dutchman whose picture in the National
Gallery, “Christ blessing Children,” was taken for a Rembrandt,
and—whatever technical cause may have altered the attribution—was in
spirit worthy of that name of names.
[Illustration:
_D. Anderson_
TITIAN. THE GARDEN OF THE LOVES
(MADRID)
]
And now the next child is Carpaccio’s. That great master’s work was dear
to Ruskin in his later Venetian visits; in his earlier he had not seen
it with that first true sight which is virtually first sight, and makes
a shepherd and a Romeo of the lagging lover. When he was well aware of
Carpaccio Ruskin studied his lovely work in the Schiavoni chapel, and
the Saint Ursula series, described in the latest and the freshest of his
writings. But there is one figure—one of three—that sits in the midst of
Carpaccio’s designs, and in the midst of the art of Italy, a child
playing a lute, one of the chief creatures of the work of line and
colour. The Presentation of Christ in the Temple is going forward above;
the three boy-angels are at their music, and this one, the most simply
assiduous, props his instrument upon his lifted knee, and sedulously
watches over his left-hand fingering. The incomparable composition of
this figure owes nothing to any arbitrary ideal of form or action,
nothing to the bodily grimace in which taste had resolved that the necks
of saints, women, and children, in contradistinction to donors, must,
for the purposes of art, be twisted. Venice thought a child to be a
touching creature, thought natural action in a child to be not lower but
higher than make-believe; and when to these new and imperial perceptions
and convictions, she added the new perception of colour and tone, she
proved herself indeed a great and solitary power in painting. The art of
Venice, in the event, turned to the light, and set the darkened head of
a man against the sun and against the cloud. I think there never was a
greater new act in the history of art than this facing of the sun, this
contemplation of the shadow side of things. Tone, with all its mystery,
as well as light with all its mystery, comes about by that change of the
gazer’s station. Did Claude “first set the sun in heaven”? Tintoretto
was born nearly a century earlier than he, and Tintoretto did more than
paint the sun, he implied it by the soft darkness of withdrawal or
eclipse, by the half-light and the half-darkness, by the tenderness of
reflected lights lodged within delicate shadows, or merely in colour by
the Venetian presence of a latent gold. Carpaccio, and masters of an
earlier date than his, had made the discovery of the profounder warmth
of colour, or had perceived the value of that rich secret of the colours
of the East. Carpaccio was—some of the Schiavoni paintings prove it—a
colourist even in the great Venetian sense; but tone, in the great
Venetian sense, was to be the work of Titian. In design, however,
Carpaccio’s minstrel angel has a beauty and spirit that Titian could not
rival, something of the freshness of the flower compared with Titian’s
fruit, both rich and both fragrant, but differently. The Elizabethan
lyric has somewhat the same relation of beauties to the lyric of the
late seventeenth-century—Milton’s, Crashaw’s, Lovelace’s, or Vaughan’s:
peach-blossom to peach, and Carpaccio’s angel to Tintoretto’s.
[Illustration:
_Alinari_
TITIAN. “THE PRESENTATION IN THE TEMPLE” (Detail)
(VENICE)
]
[Illustration:
_Alinari_
TINTORETTO. “THE PRESENTATION IN THE TEMPLE” (Detail)
(VENICE)
]
The persons of Titian’s children are those of the other masters—the
Virgin’s Child, the little angels, the little loves, a Ganymede, a faun
or sylvan—with the addition of the portraits of princes already noted,
and the more memorable addition of the little Virgin. To the
humming-bird angel of the Mysteries he gives no other character than
that so familiar to us in all the schools, except only that with him the
frolic movement looks more sincere; needless to say, the tone is more
beautiful than anything yet known in the West. The little angels that
fly below the ascending Madonna of the “Assumption” have Titian’s
delicate darkness of shadows that are winged with secondary lights; if
pearls had the colours of flesh, one would liken them to pearls. To the
beautiful “Ganymede” in our National Gallery, at one time ascribed to
Titian, is now hardly accorded the certainty of a pupil’s name; but we
have possession of a part of an assured Titian child in the human half
of the little satyr or faun who goes in the train of Dionysos. He is a
satyr-urchin of the ways of the woods, an _enfant des rues_ of the
forest and the shore of Naxos; he drags by a string the remnants and
fragments of a sacrifice, as a child going on human feet pulls a toy
horse after him, happy in knowing that it follows, as a backward glance
now and then assures him. He does not laugh, but has a festal gravity as
he skips that is perfectly childish. He is savage, simple, and idle, and
has joined the rout of the progress of the god as a boy in London
follows a show. The Venetian honesty and the Venetian freshness are
manifest in this strolling, trolling figure of Antiquity and the wild
coast. The beauty of the head and the dark eyes is unmarred by any
habitual form of prettiness. The sense of childhood is sincere. If a
child—or but a half-child—is to bear a part in the journeys of the
wine-god, his Silenus, his nymphs, and his leopards, with clashing
cymbals and outcries, this is the childish part—to drag something with a
string. A Florentine would have made the little faun playing an
instrument—he would have had, at the least, to know something of the
cymbals or the triangle. I think that Botticelli’s _amorini_ sporting
with the arms and casque of the sleeping Mars show less feeling for
child’s-play. Titian’s faun is a child of sunshine, as is the beautiful
god leaping from his car, embrowned with summer. Is it indeed of this
picture (we must not doubt it) that Keats was thinking when he made his
Bacchus, journeying eastwards,
“enough white
For Venus’ pearly bite”?
Keats was a great poet of the imagination, and would have been, with
other examples and a riper life, an infinitely great poet of the
imaginative and impassioned intellect. As it is, he is praised as a poet
of the senses, whereas the truth is that his senses were not rich, but
sickly. Of a fruit he loved the “pulp” rather than the “heartening
savour”; of lips, the “pulp” again; of a woman, her “softling” hand and
a “bleat”; of Bacchus his plumpness and the unsunned whiteness of his
flesh.
Titian’s “Garden of the Loves,” or “Hill of Venus,” at the Prado, is a
very beautiful picture, expressing the delight, that Italy learnt from
Antiquity, in an infant court of the maternal Venus. Delight is perhaps
not the word, for the pleasure of the Renascence in these frolic _putti_
does not reach close to the heart; it is rather a pleasure at arm’s
length. The babes of this rich “Garden” are not drawn very
realistically, but they are not falsified, and it is natural to find in
them some likeness to the children of the fishermen of the islands.
It is in his majestic painting of the “Presentation of the Virgin in the
Temple” that Titian has drawn his simplest child. The picture is a great
state-picture, a Venetian reading of the Apocryphal Scriptures, and an
example of the Venetians’ incomparable sense of the dignity of place and
approach. Titian causes us to look upwards at his noble figures, his
noble priest, and at their action, worthy to take place under the sky.
Even in their modern decline and fall, Italians generally keep that
sense of distant approach and room which is the most obvious part of
Titian’s dignities; they still know the value of a staircase, which
English architects, going, as it were, with their elbows close to their
sides, have never had. The Italian takes measures at a suitable
distance, addresses himself, begins spaciously to draw near. But the
master, having this, had also a greater and finer feeling, and his
architecture serves to lift the paternal priest, the humble girl, into
splendid light and sight. The legend that gives him the subject of his
picture had been illustrated by the masters, but not very often or by
them all. We find it in Florence, at Siena, at Padua. It is amongst the
miniatures of the Homilies of James the Monk in the National Library of
Paris. Giotto painted it at Padua, and shows himself embarrassed by the
little girl; Taddeo Gaddi gives her great stature and a small head, an
equivocal figure turning on the stairway to take leave of the world;
Giovanni da Milano has a simpler child; Orcagna counts strictly the
fifteen stairs of the legend; Ghirlandajo shows a young princess of
fifteen in a starred mantle; Sodoma has a child, tenderly relinquished
by her mother; Cima da Conegliano and Carpaccio bring the scene to
Venice. But it is not one of the habitual subjects. Its legend tells (by
means of a “gospel” not accepted as canonical by the Catholic Church,
and, therefore, so accepted by none of the sects) of the dedication of
Mary in her early girlhood to the service of the Temple of Solomon. Some
traditions add the miraculous detail of her infancy, and of her climbing
the steps alone though too young, in the ordinary course of life, to
walk; of the wonder of Joachim and Anne to whom their little daughter
bade farewell, turning to them from the Temple steps. Titian keeps the
tradition of her going up, and he makes her go alone. But she is no
infant—a little girl of seven years or more, whose beautiful hair has
had time to grow. With a charming symbolism, Titian has made the nimbus,
worn by other Saints around their heads, to crown her whole figure, from
head to foot. This is one of the few little girls in Italian art; and
the Venetian has not taken that sweet opportunity with less than the
simplicity of his noble nature; he has not taken occasion for a
trivially beautiful, or, as we say now, a sentimental little maiden. He
has made her nothing but simple in her loveliness; she is erect, a
straightforward child, and with this the whole expression of the lifted
head accords. The action is perhaps somewhat of another time of life,
but all else is purely childlike, and incomparably sweet.
Much like Titian’s is Tintoretto’s “Presentation of the Virgin,” but the
picture, and the figure, are less simple. It is still the most beautiful
of his children, but, though somewhat more “touching,” is less great and
less unconscious than Titian’s. It is wonderful that the two profiles,
both so young and so little spoilt by posture, should yet be lifted up
thus with a difference. Tintoretto’s picture, none the less, is a
splendid one. It has more passion, more movement, and that splendour of
the shadow-view in which Tintoretto surpassed Titian. The shadow-view is
the luminous view. Best of all, the Virgin’s little figure going up the
stair is directly against the sky and the cloud, whereas in Titian’s
picture the child is backed by a pillar.
Amongst Tintoretto’s children are some exquisite Bambini. The new-born
Christ of his “Adoration of the Shepherds” (in the Scuola di San Rocco),
unveiled in a stream of lovely light by a most beautiful Virgin, is a
sincere baby; so is the Child in the strangely splendid group of Madonna
and Child in the Accademia picture. We have seen the Madonna’s Child in
a thousand forms, and on the knees and in the arms of a Mother under a
thousand forms; but Tintoretto’s Virgin and Child are both different,
and fresh, as are Tintoretto’s “Nativity” and his most dramatic and
solemn “Last Supper.” He takes very literally “a new point of view,” by
placing his figures aloft, or his table in perspective, away, in a large
room. True, Parmigiano has a Madonna and Child raised up higher than
Tintoretto’s, looking purely commonplace and conventional—a revelation
without alarm, an insurprising vision; but Tintoretto’s Virgin, against
a visionary sun, sits as though no other had ever been enthroned, and
holds a veritable Child, a beautiful and animated creature, looking
downwards with an infantile impulse, full of liberal grace; the little
head, in a Tintoretto radiance, casting a Tintoretto shadow on the
shoulder and breast. Of this master’s “Massacre of the Innocents” and of
the many repetitions of this subject in the Italian schools, I give
neither reproduction nor description. The painters made this a picture
of women, in strife with the assassins, rather than of children, and the
character of children or their action is hardly in question; an
executioner has them by the leg, or their fragments are on the ground.
But Tintoretto’s picture at San Rocco—he has another at the Frari—is
magnificent. With his characteristic tenderness he has drawn the little
figure of a child that has crawled from the slaughter.
The last of all the examples of Italian children in this picture-book
shall be a peaceful and emblematic _puttino_. It represents Paolo
Veronese, “a noble Venetian,” but no equal to Tintoretto. The child has
the Venetian sincerity; he is really burdened by his sheaf, and even
anxious about the carriage, and is in his own rich person a sign of
abundance.
Italy is said to have much sweetened and softened the children of the
German, Flemish, and Dutch schools by her amiable example. She civilized
the nations of children, fed them high, put an end to all crying and
frowardness, sleeked them, and proclaimed a holiday in the nurseries of
art. It may be so; but after this mission, she might have brought home a
lesson, to make her own sweet humour more valuable. And one master of
masters, Rembrandt, had nothing to learn from “_le clair génie latin_.”
Velazquez studied Titian and Tintoretto; Reynolds studied
Michelangiolo—where did he find the “Strawberry Girl”? Not in such a
nursery as the Sistine Chapel.
If these pages are varied—in all their delight in the children of the
arts—by some disparagement of a certain number of _putti_ who turn out
their feet in a manner that seems but a poor improvement on the ways of
Nature, no descendant exists to resent the criticism, for those children
never grew up. But the little boys of the Della Robbias, of Giovanni
Bellini, of Tintoretto, mortals, ideally sweet, have left their seed in
“sub-celestial” Italy, and the angels of Botticelli never died.
[Illustration: Printer’s device of the Chiswick Press: an oval emblem
featuring a lion standing above a coiled serpent, with the imprint
Chiswick Press: Charles Whittingham and Co., Took’s Court, Chancery
Lane, London.]
CHISWICK PRESS: CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND CO.
TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE, LONDON.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
● Fixed typos; non-standard spelling and dialect retained.
● Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.
● Images without captions use HTML alt text.
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