Chapter II: Part 2

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.

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.

_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.

_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.

_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.

_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.

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

_From a painting of the Holy Family._

_(Pitti Palace, Florence)_
]

_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.

_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.

_Houghton_

ROSSO. ANGEL PLAYING THE LUTE (Detail)

(FLORENCE)
]

_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.”

_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.

_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.

_Tiberio Titi. Pinx._ _Walker & Cockerell Ph. Sc._

_Infant Prince Leopoldo._
]

_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.

_Boraccio Pinx._ _Walker & Cockerell Ph. Sc._

_Infant Prince Federigo._
]

_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.

_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.

_Matteo di Giovanni Pinx._ _Walker & Cockerell Ph. Sc._

_Virgin and Child with Angels._

(_Accademia, Siena_)
]

_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.