Chapter I: Part 1

CHILDREN
OF THE
OLD MASTERS

_All rights reserved._

_Filippino Lippi. Pinx._ _Walker & Cockerell Ph. Sc._

_Sacred Family._
]

CHILDREN
OF THE
OLD MASTERS
(ITALIAN SCHOOL)

BY
ALICE MEYNELL

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.

_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.

_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.”

_Alinari_

SCHOOL OF DONATELLO. ANGELS

(PADUA)
]

_Houghton_

DONATELLO. WINGED PUTTI

(FLORENCE)
]

_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.

_Alinari_

DONATELLO. HEAD OF A CHILD

(FLORENCE)
]

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.

LUCA DELLA ROBBIA. SKETCH FOR A PANEL OF THE SINGING GALLERY IN THE
DUOMO, FLORENCE

(SOUTH KENSINGTON)
]

_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.

_Alinari_

LUCA DELLA ROBBIA. CHILD WITH FLOWERS AND FRUIT

(CITTA DI CASTELLO)
]

_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.

_Jacopo della Quercia_ _Walker & Cockerell Ph Sc_

_Madonna and Child._
]

ROSSELLINO. MADONNA AND CHILD

(SOUTH KENSINGTON)
]

_Alinari_

BENEDETTO DA MAIANO. MADONNA AND CHILD

(PRATO)
]

_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.

_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.

_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.

_Houghton_

BENOZZO GOZZOLI. ST. AUGUSTINE AT SCHOOL (Detail)

(SAN GIMIGNANO)
]

_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.

_Houghton_

FRA ANGELICO. ST. LAURENCE GIVING ALMS (Detail)
]