Chapter III: Part 3

In the church of Santo Spirito, also in Siena, there is, attributed to Matteo Balducci, a curious Tuscan picture—it is, if he is the painter, Florentine, nevertheless it has something of the outlying provincial manner in design and in the character of his Madonna’s face. The painter surrounds the seated figure, rising from the symbolical tomb, with the _mandorla_ of winged angel-heads, children frankly drawn from life, with a careful variety of attitude. These little bodiless ones are a characteristically Italian version of the prophet’s angels, each with six wings—“With twain he covered his face, and with twain he covered his feet, and with twain he did fly.” Italian art gives this angel no feet, but crosses the lower twain of his wings under the chin, no doubt to hide the decollation; the twain that should veil the face are open and erect, for so amiable and so pretty a head is not to be covered, and the twain that fly have little to do but to carry a strange little monster, moth-like, on his fluttering way. Nothing could be less ancient and less Hebrew. The bodiless ones became a commonplace of art, and their strangeness soon disappeared in tediousness; in all dull art there is nothing duller, and the little heads flutter, a proverb for absurdity, and with the last inappropriateness, on the tombstones of the eighteenth-century. One cannot easily believe that they were at any time really interesting, and yet Matteo Balducci almost persuades us that he liked them. This picture of his has, besides the six-winged heads, four entire child-angels, winged like the commonalty of heaven; two wearing the ribbons of Italian taste and running, each upon a piece of cloud; and two standing as little guards before the vacant tomb, one rather prettily alert, the other in an adult attitude of meditation which—one would think—might strike even the simplest spectator as insincere. Saint Francis on one side and Saint Catherine of Siena on the other contemplate the mystery of the Assumption, and in the distance is an ingenious landscape of coast and winding reaches of the sea. Triviality and gravity, both of a kind alien to our thoughts, divide this design, and many a remotely Oriental composition would seem nearer to our present mind, more intelligible and interesting.

_Alinari_

PINTURICCHIO. ST. JOHN PREACHING

(SIENA)
]

Luca Signorelli, born in another of the steep cities of the hill country of middle Italy, into which the sun looks as they go up their mountains by steps—Cortona—was one of the Sistine painters, but his best works are at Orvieto and at Città di Castello. The “Coronation of Saint Cecilia” is decorated by a number of _putti_ of the conventional kind, playing with flowers which they hold with a detached little finger _en minaudant_. At any rate one of them performs this action of Italian elegance—the dancing-master again!—but another has a fresher and truer movement as he reaches up to catch a falling rose, for the flowers are scattered by the hands of the Virgin. Her Child stands on her knee to crown Saint Cecilia, who wears roses for a wreath, as Tennyson has her, and carries her organ-pipes and her palm. Crowns like hers lie at the feet of Saint Catherine of Alexandria and Saint Elizabeth of Hungary. The expressions of these and of the episcopal and monastic Saints standing above is unequal—very sweet and still in some instances, and in others somewhat conventional, strained in the manner that grows tedious with a tediousness wholly of Latin race, the tediousness of habitual exaggeration. That habit—exaggeration—has relaxed the whole language of French religion, for instance; the French paraphrase of the Scriptures is as it were an instrument with strings so loosened as to be incapable of music or meaning. If the tense habit can do so much for a language, it may well overtax an art indifferently vigorous.

In a picture at the Poldi-Pezzoli Gallery, Milan, by the Ferrarese master Cosimo Tura, or more probably by one of his school, we have at last three boys who, though nude and symbolical, are neither the _putti_ of the schools nor the angels of a sentimental Italian convention. A young maternal Charity, seated under a few white horizontal clouds, such as a tender blue May sky so often bears in Italy, holds a scroll-like scarf for the rather aimless play of two of the boys, but the third is really playing at horses with it; he prances and obviously makes a horsey noise.

_Alinari_

PINTURICCHIO THE CHILD JESUS AND THE LITTLE ST. JOHN (Detail)

(SIENA)
]

And now Perugia and Urbino become central to the art of Italy. Pinturicchio, Perugino, and Raphael rule the time, and the time is a great one. Perugino may not be to us all that criticism held him to be in the time of reaction against the love of the Carracci—who were the greatest (as well as the latest) of all the Italians, in the grotesque opinion of Horace Walpole. On its way back to the older Florentines, the taste of the dilettante paused upon Pietro Perugino as on a master comparatively early, tender, spiritual, and candid. It was a higher thing to admire the recollected and feminine attitude of a saint of his under a blue sky than the muscular action of a saint of Guercino’s against a convention of cloud; and the little tree of the Umbrian background than the gloomy Neapolitan’s twisted forests. And with this master of Raphael is Raphael’s father, Giovanni Santi, contemporaries together, and heralds and forerunners of the painter whom nearly all men love to praise. In relation to children Giovanni Santi seems to be memorable chiefly by reason of a little girl, a daughter of donors, set on her knees in front of her father and mother to offer her devotions to the Bambino of a pale Madonna—a Bambino having nothing remarkable, granted the time and school. But this little girl in her close cap, who is evidently there because the pair behind her have no son, is purely childlike, and kneels, like a child, on both knees, simple and erect, her hands before her and the soles of her feet behind her, under her little sombre petticoat. Santi’s angels are much like those of Balducci, if Balducci it be—winged heads of veritable children making a crown. Their roundness is here in contrast with the worn and patient Saints, a wrinkled Saint Francis of Assisi showing his transfixed hands, Saint John the Baptist hollow-cheeked, Saint John the Evangelist in extreme old age (we must suppose that the donor’s name is John, like the painter’s); and Saint Sebastian only of the four is young, and his whole body is pierced with arrows. Of Perugino’s many Bambini none has more sweetness than the Child whom a young angel has placed on a cushion so that the Virgin’s hands, released from their burden, might be folded. To some charming angel, almost feminine in action, many a master has given this office, making of the heavenly youth a little nurse for a time, so that the maternal knees, all day long the throne of Christ, may be bent and press the earth like those of all mankind. The Child here has the beauty of a direct look, meeting the Virgin’s eyes, and his hands have the action of a child; hardly so the boy Saint John with his light cross against his shoulder, daintily kneeling upon one knee.

It would be hard if in Pinturicchio’s gaiety the children of his pictures had not their part. And there is actually something cheerful in the two figures of Christ and Saint John (in the Siena Accademia), the one in a patterned vestment, the other in his camel’s hair, both with their feet curiously laced. The attitudes are arbitrary and not infantine, but there is a smile closed within the face, and especially within the mouth, of each. In the Città di Castello picture, the young Saint John has something recalling the sprightly look of a San Giovannino of Filippo or Filippino Lippi, but at some distance. Pinturicchio’s gaiety is not quite Florentine; the gentler city had, if not the lighter heart, the lighter wit, and the Tuscan smile is more intelligent. Pinturicchio’s is rather a doll-like Bambino in this beautiful picture, small-headed, but the expression is tender, much more explicitly and intelligibly tender than is usual in this age. The young Saint John takes here the benediction of his Lamb.

The same Saint John, grown a man, preaches to a little boy, in the Siena Cathedral. Pinturicchio, repeating yet once more the ever-unintelligible failure of the fifteenth-century Italian to make any Saint do what he himself could not but do—give his hands vivacity to carry a meaning—can think of nothing better than that poor ineptitude of gesture I have already mentioned; his Baptist convinces the audience before him, including the little boy, by counting his reasonings and proofs on his left fingers with his right. See how unable are also the other hands, and how ineloquent; a young man lifts one hand in the gesture wherewith the whole art of Italy wearies us, and the boy crosses his two hands over his breast, not child-wise. But there is an unwonted thought in the placing of this little auditor in the forefront, for he is not a saint by name, but only a very good Umbrian. In the minds of English people, doubtless the most conspicuous Pinturicchio child-Christ is the curled one standing by the prettiest of Madonnas on a carpeted parapet, in the National Gallery picture. The prettiest she is, with each eye larger than her mouth, and the Child stands with a kind of Perugino salience of the hip. His little features are gathered close together under a vast forehead. But in these two faces, so conventional and rigid in their beauty, the genius of Pinturicchio and the habit of feeling of the fifteenth-century have placed sanctity and a remote tranquillity.

PERUGINO. MADONNA AND CHILD WITH THE LITTLE ST. JOHN
]

As for Mantegna, few infants of his have become the darlings of the Galleries, but there is something memorable in the slightest of his designs. The Madonna of one of his drawings, whose long mantle comes into the foreground with something Flemish in its angular folds, has laid her Son upon the end of this garment spread upon the ground. He is the youngest and most helpless of the Children of the Masters, but Mantegna’s grave hand has moulded with power the powerless bent limbs and closed hands of the new-born. There is a suggestion of the North in this figure as well as in the drapery.

RAPHAEL AND AFTER

It is the Raphael of children, and not the whole Raphael, that is in question here; and any temerity of opinion whereto these pages may bear witness will for that cause be more easily forgiven. The master whose name is tender and august, sweet and venerable, in the ears of generations in all Europe, added this or that to the arts of arrangement and design, but he rather continued and fulfilled than renewed the painting of childhood; he certainly did not invent the grace we call Raphaelesque, for we have seen this misunderstanding and misconception of childhood persist, before his date, in all the schools of the peninsula; we have had it by rote, and the formula is known. In Santa Maria della Pace, in Rome, Raphael has some loves or angels, part of the fresco of the four Sibyls, figures nobly composed as design, but far less than noble or natural as studies of children. One, in particular, may be taken as the representative of the whole convention, and this is his attitude: he kneels upon one knee, and the other corpulent leg is bent, and its foot turned out excessively; the body is twisted from the hip so that—as De Musset’s dancing-master danced—it should contradict the turn of the foot, and it is also bent abruptly at the waist; and this twist is wrenched aside again by the turn of the head and neck; there are five zigzags, or perhaps one should say three zigs and two zags; and all this elegance performed by a babe for whom those pranks were never intended, for whose shape they are unfitted, whose mind could not grasp them, whose spirit they do not express, whose simplicity they violate, and for whose own honest graces they prove the painter inventing them to have neither heart nor eye. Raphael was not that painter, he had no kind of originality in the device, he fell in with the custom, only carrying it, in this instance of the angel, somewhat farther; but his was the propaganda which is seldom the inventor’s; he imposed the formula of grace upon all Europe; he declined upon Canova, upon Sir Thomas Lawrence, upon the Italian decorator, upon George IV. True distinction, such as that of Sir Joshua Reynolds—true freshness—was untouched by that sickly prescription, but nothing inferior escaped it. It was the rhetoric of the body, it depreciated attitude. Chancing lately to enter a Chinese temple in San Francisco on a great festival night, and to see a priest diligently dancing to and fro in front of the altar of his gods, I had one chief thought. The priest was, unlike the men of his crowded congregation, a majestic creature, of stature and spirit, with an oval face flanked narrowly by the long lappets of a fine headdress. He danced long and fervently, with a whole code of actions and attitudes altogether alien in our eyes and of unintelligible beauty. And the chief thought of the European stranger was this—that here was a grace in which Raphael had no part. Nothing I had ever before seen in adult public life, nothing in church, street or theatre, on platform, or on the trapeze, had been so unlike Raphael. There was nothing of Raphael in the derivation of that elegance, not even the protest against Raphael whereby the English pre-Raphaelites of the middle of the nineteenth-century implicitly recognized, while they renounced him. The Chinese priest was all apart from Raphael, and this was the thing that struck the traveller—so long, so wide and general is the obsession of Raphael in Europe, and the dancer from beyond the East and beyond the West came thus far to prove another lineage.

_Naya_

ANDREA MANTEGNA. CHERUBS (Detail.)
]

Meantime, nevertheless, there was always the child at home, the Italian child and the English alike, visibly as free from Raphael as the Chinese priest. Art, the dance, and the stage might take the sickly pose, but the child’s body was free. And Raphael himself saw this. He was more original when he drew children that were not, than when he designed children that were, Raphaelesque. That is, he saw for himself the grave childish glance and the huddled position of the Boy of the “Madonna della Seggiola”; here is no twist of attitude; the head is aside, indeed, but as nature turns it, and not for the sake of attitude. Moreover, this is a clasped child, not one touched at the distance, and with the unconstraining hand and the parted fingers, of Italian grace. The Madonna of this picture is the most popular of all the master’s Madonnas, but she is not fine enough to resist the wearying effect of her scattered fame; her face, often repeated, grows tedious. But the Boy’s head does not tire our interest and admiration. If we are weary of the picture, we know that of one part we are not so, and that the “Madonna della Seggiola” is at once a hackneyed work and a fresh.

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

_Angel from the fresco of the four Sibyls_

_(Santa Maria della Pace, Rome)_
]

No less beautiful, and invested in the imaginations of some spectators with greater nobility, is the Child of the Dresden “Madonna di San Sisto.” He too is free from the Raphaelesque pose, and the childish figure bears a head forced not at all from the character of its age by its look of intellect and power. There is all the quality of a portrait in that head, with its eyelids folded down at the outer corner—a not beautiful but not ignoble irregularity wherewith the older masters would not have had the heart to roughen the features of a little Christ. For them were the long and fine corners of well-finished eyes. Raphael probably saw such severe eyelids in a living boy; and in this picture they make a detail of likeness between the Child and the most worthy of the master’s Virgins. This young dark-haired woman walks all the ages and all the spaces, and in some happy hour Raphael set on her arm his single solemn Child. Only in the arbitrary and not very fortunate puff of her veil is this beautiful group marred by evident convention. But in the Saint Barbara kneeling below, in the two angels to whom she smiles, Raphael turns again to the adulterated feeling of Italy. The two _putti_ have no more than a pretence of natural action—a somewhat deliberate make-believe in the raised shoulders of the one, the huddled chin and pushed-up mouth of the other. These _puttini_ are intended to be at their ease, and in designing them the master has denied himself his habitual grace; none the more are they true. For beauty and extreme sweetness—mere sweetness—a foremost babe of Raphael’s is that of the “Madonna del Cardellino,” who with languishing looks, and the attitude of a woman, with projected hip and languid leg, caresses the bird brought to him by a laughing Saint John. And of the _putti_, none are more artificial than two in the “Madonna del Baldacchino,” who are singing their parts from a scroll of music. Women’s attitudes again are theirs, and women’s looks, but the women who should practise these would be lacking in uprightness and simplicity.

See also the twist of the Bambino of the Foligno Madonna, who turns shoulders, head, pelvis, knees, and feet in as many directions in a kind of convulsion of affectation and grace; and the unchildish manner of standing of the Child in the Louvre picture; all these are Italian improvements upon a nature unwatched and neglected. The great time of art is checked in its greatness by this figure of a child mishandled. That it is not altogether a great time we know by the rebuke, always at hand, of a living child’s authentic action and incomparable beauty. The pride of the sixteenth-century is, in this sense, at the mercy of a photograph.

Close upon Raphael followed the painters of Parma, more fluent, softer, riper than even he. A reaction against Raphael probably strikes with still more vigour against Correggio. Yet this last-named has more of the false elegance in the woman’s action, and less in the child’s. The smiling mother turns her shoulders and her head, but the Bambino is often straightforward; thus Correggio tampers with the lesser simplicity. He is fond of a dainty strife between the baby and the mother, the one catching at the veil, the other checking the little hands. For the famous _putti_ of Parma, with their exuberant and sentimental prettiness, few men with modern feeling can have a warm admiration. It is a surprise to find Ruskin owning a rich and gay charm in these frolic children. Whether as pictures of beautiful boys and angels or as a decoration, is a company of Correggio’s children in their hide and seek what we would choose for beauty and delight? Were these happy ends ever attained by means so conscious and so luxurious? We have learnt, rather, that something more sparing is not only more beautiful, but more joyous.

_Houghton_

RAPHAEL. ANGELS, “MADONNA DI S. SISTO” (Detail)

(DRESDEN)
]

_Alinari_

RAPHAEL. MADONNA “WITH THE GOLDFINCH,” CHRIST AND INFANT ST. JOHN

(FLORENCE)
]

After Correggio the decline comes quickly; and the word “decline” seems to express but ill the flimsy scattering of genius. For genius grows thin, light, and cold, and wastes. Parmigiano, aiming at beauty only, should perhaps have aimed at something loftier or further in order to hit the swift and incontrollable creature. I cannot think that the composition of his, held to be most beautiful, does cause the delight that is the sanction of beauty. This is the group of eight young figures—“Amorini Scherzanti”—of the picture in the Palazzo Mancini gallery at Città di Castello. One of the eight is a youth, the others are little rounded boys; the elder is Love, and the seven play with his arrows. Nothing could be more purely a work dedicated to loveliness and pleasure; and yet there is not a figure there but has, in spite of the action, the movement, the sport of lines, an invincible dullness. It is not extravagance, it is not excitement, it is not excess, or dizziness, or delirium, that chastises habitual pleasure in art, but only dullness; and when children are made the ministers of that habit, the dullness looks the more foolish. One of the Latin races, having the dullness and keeping wit enough to name it, has the word for it—_banalité_.

Thus the figure of a child corrects and rebukes. The review of children in art seems to promise delight and indulgence, but we find in it various sentences of judgment.

In Rome, where all ornaments are cast into a certain mould, the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century taste held upright things in so much dislike that the straightest thing in the world, the chasuble of a priest, must be caught in a gale, so that it should flutter with folds like the scarf of a woman. A hurricane would hardly suffice, in fact, to set flying this rigid Romanesque vestment, but there is no sculpture where Bernini lets it hang plainly in the attitude for which it was made. The inappropriate flight is much like the forbidding of the Italian urchin to stand upon two simple and equal feet.

The word “after” has doubtless more significance when it waits upon the name of Raphael than in any other of the conditions of the history of art. To follow Raphael is to follow that which, in certain aspects great, in certain qualities nobly ideal, in certain examples incorrupt, was yet in a greater number manifestly and explicitly corruptible.

_Giovanni Bellini. Pinx._ _Walker & Cockerell Ph. Sc._

_Angel playing the Flute._
]

THE VENETIANS

Venice is not “after” Raphael. Her school is the only school of Italy that bears to him no such reference. Its date, though later, has none of the indignity of that sequence. It is true that the natural and inevitable derivation, the heredity as well as the inheritance, from the whole national past, helped the genius of the place, the genius of the East, and the genius of the transalpine North, to make the Venetian art; but Venice had no part in the general rhythm, the rise and fall. She kept her own time and walked at her own speed. As her Tintoretto is not “after” Raphael, her Gentile Bellini is not a pre-Raphaelite.

Moreover, she has this singular favour: that whereas other cities had one inspiration, held it while it lasted, then remembered it, later remembered that they had remembered it, and then lost even this “darling of their widowhead,” regret, and, lacking it, grew fat and cheerful, Venice received two inspirations. The first was in the time of the Bellinis, and the second after fifty and more years, when, with the birth of Titian, colour and tone, in a new sense, and as a new gift to the Occident, began to warm our world. At the earlier date, as at the later, Venice was original. No other master of his time was original as was Giovanni Bellini. But more wonderful is the originality and illustrious novelty of the late masters of Venice, contemporaries of the decadent painters of every other city of Italy, from Naples to the Alps; and it is to the present purpose that we should find the signs of this fresh and imperial source of life in the painting of childhood.

Giovanni Bellini’s children are unlike those of the Tuscan and the Roman; if, in his design, he does not attempt to transcend nature, neither does he see her amiss, or force her. The Divine Child is studied from the poor infant in the arms of the Venetian woman. She is made graver and more beautiful than life, arbitrarily beautiful with her long features, long eyebrows, and full yet delicate cheeks; but the Child is made simply natural, and less beautiful than pathetic. Pathos had hardly entered into the Florentine idea of the infancy of Christ, but it is seldom absent from the Venetian. And this is not said on account of the art of Giovanni Bellini only; the most pathetic child in our National Gallery is another Venetian’s—the sleeping Child whose heavy little chin is propped upon the Mother’s arm in Crivelli’s great gilded and inlaid picture, in three stages, of the “Virgin and Child with Saints.” In the midst of the “bearded councillors of God,” flanked by pontiffs, doctors, and virgins, on the knees of the woman who was clothed with the sun, lifted over some gold fifteenth-century altar, Crivelli sets a wearied baby, not only tired but sad with his fatigue, slipping, all unbraced, with his chin caught up; in the first months of a hard life, weak as a spent wave, light, but too heavy for his own strength, sheltered from privation and sickness by the depth of the refuge of sleep. There is not, of course, the modern appeal of expression; the mother is tranquil, and the child’s face locked in peace, but the painter gives to the childish figure all the sadness possible with closed eyes.

_Alinari_

GIOVANNI BELLINI. ALTAR-PIECE OF S. GIOBBE (Detail)

(VENICE)
]

_Anderson_

GIOVANNI BELLINI. MADONNA AND CHILD

(VENICE)
]

_Alinari_

ALVISE VIVARINI (formerly attributed to BELLINI). ANGEL

(VENICE)
]

Bellini also has the Bambino asleep, a beautiful but meagre figure of a young child with one arm dropped, and something sombre in the depth of sleep. Here is no _geste arrondi_, the grace is purely nature’s, and it is lovely beyond the rivalry of artifice; I will not say of art, for an English wit has well said that affectation displeases us because it has not too much, but too little, art. Bellini has not been afraid of a straight arm and a heavy head, and his art is more, not less, than his Florentine contemporary Verrocchio’s. Furthermore, one may wonder why Venice alone in Italy did not play the gossip nor boast like a nurse of the weight of the central child of pictures. Christ is tender, thin, and delicate in the designs of the Adriatic painters; never more sweet or more worn than in Giovanni Bellini’s group referred to at the beginning of this volume. The tender figure is tenderly treated; the little silken rings of curls—no signs of vigour as with Botticelli or Raphael—are exquisitely drawn. And it is only when he paints an attendant angel that the master makes childhood flourish, sleeks the hair, and creases the wrist. Bellini’s flute-playing winged _putto_ from the Frari picture is more conventional, but he does not cease to be a child. Nor does Vivarini’s, long taken for a work of Bellini, the detail of the beautiful picture in the church of the Redentore, who sings to his lute, as befits his wings, beyond his years, but has the attitude of a human child, the only attitude tolerable with limbs so fair and full. Here also is the Venetian characteristic. And doubtless it is also in that singular design of Giovanni Bellini’s which is catalogued (at the Uffizi, Florence) by no more definite name than that of _Un’ allegoria religiosa_. We see here a landscape full of caves, rocks, steps, and houses, a landscape into the depths of which the eye may follow Saints to their business or their solitudes, wayfaring with an ass or in retreat within a hollow. In the foreground is a well-paved court inclosed within a white marble balustrade, waist-high. A beautiful throne is raised to the left for the veiled and enwrapped Virgin, and at her feet kneels one of the martyr-patronesses—Catherine, Barbara, Agnes, or Lucy—with flowing hair; a humbler woman-saint, with gathered hair, stands on the other side of the throne; Saint Paul, Saint Peter, Saint Sebastian, and Saint Paul the Hermit, or some other anchorite, stand praying, whilst four children at play have these reverend eyes, and evidently the reverend thoughts, fixed upon them. They are all _putti_ unwinged; one shakes a little orange-tree growing in a pot in the middle of the court, and the others catch the oranges, with charming actions, hold them, and eat them, all absorbed in their pleasure, as are their holy spectators. Saint Peter especially is intent upon them, holding up his hands to pray, and the Virgin Mother herself, praying also, seems to return to them the morning and evening prayers of childhood. There is no interpreting the allegory. The little boys are symbolical, but they are also mere boys, and not about the usual business of angels.

_Alinari_

GIOVANNI BELLINI. AN ALLEGORY

(FLORENCE)
]

_Alinari_

CARPACCIO. “THE PRESENTATION” (Detail)

(VENICE)
]

Also to Giovanni Bellini’s noble hand do we owe the group of three young ones—children they are hardly—playing their instruments at the foot of the Madonna’s chair. Such a group of three was a peculiarly Venetian gathering of the Society of the Mysteries. The ceremonial passes above—a New-Testament incident, or merely the enthronement of Mother and Child; tall Saints stand at either side, and the three, a little under life-size, and of about the age of Botticelli’s younger angels and Baptists, sit making music on the unequal steps. In the same Accademia with this beautiful Bellini is the more beautiful Carpaccio thus arranged, and other examples of this Venetian group of grace and gravity are in the memories of all. Carpaccio followed Bellini after some twenty years, and he evidently followed him in the convention of this trio of strings. Bellini’s violinist is one of the most youthfully and freely graceful figures of Italian art—graceful with what innocence of the postures of the other schools! There is much difference between the leaning-aside of this most beautiful head and the leaning-aside of a Roman angel’s. The Venetian youth has a masculine rectitude; and with this a glance of genius, candid and grave. Where, in Florence, are such simple eyes? If he were more a child this would be the place to pause longer upon their significance, and upon the heedless beauty of the soft and spreading hair.

But between Bellini’s date and Carpaccio’s comes that of Crivelli, a master of the period that was early for Venice, yet a contemporary of Mantegna at Mantua and of Verrocchio in Tuscany. Something has already been said here of Crivelli’s Bambino, the sad Child over-tired. In another National Gallery picture, the famous “Annunciation,” full of architecture, there is a glimpse of an inceremonial wayside child; and for once it is probably a girl. A citizen or two passes on the noble and narrow ways of the fifteenth-century city. The mystic Dove is coming upon a beam of light in at a ground-floor palace window; within, Mary kneels at prayer, and behind her are the flowered curtains of her bed, its coverlet and pillow, brackets with vases, pots, books, a glass bottle, a candlestick, a box, and dishes of majolica. Plants are in the window behind the bars; above the room is a magnificent loggia, and a peacock sits upon the parapet with a tail sweeping down to the architrave of the Virgin’s beautiful door. Without, a street leads to an archway, and beyond lies a stepped garden inclosed by a machicolated wall. The herald of Heaven, on his knees upon the foreground pavement, has a twisted feather fastened to the jewel in his cap, a chain of gold, plumes upon his shoulder, and acanthus-leaves. The young Emidius, Bishop and patron of Ascoli, seems to interrupt the Archangel in order to recommend to him the turretted city he holds in his hands. Far off, on the terrace of the archway, one man reads a paper to another. On some narrow palace-steps, truly a Venetian little staircase, a gentleman of the city and two monks hold a conversation. And all this takes a new animation from the childlike action of a little girl whom that conversation does not amuse, but who perceives something to be taking place in the street, and thrusts a curious head, in a cap, round the staircase balustrade, to look below. How rare, in Italian art, is such a child. Venice here has a heart for something simple, something serious as well as slight, and something other than adult and condescending. The glorious Venetian master has this heart in common with the German and the Fleming, and with that divine Dutchman whose picture in the National Gallery, “Christ blessing Children,” was taken for a Rembrandt, and—whatever technical cause may have altered the attribution—was in spirit worthy of that name of names.

_D. Anderson_

TITIAN. THE GARDEN OF THE LOVES

(MADRID)
]

And now the next child is Carpaccio’s. That great master’s work was dear to Ruskin in his later Venetian visits; in his earlier he had not seen it with that first true sight which is virtually first sight, and makes a shepherd and a Romeo of the lagging lover. When he was well aware of Carpaccio Ruskin studied his lovely work in the Schiavoni chapel, and the Saint Ursula series, described in the latest and the freshest of his writings. But there is one figure—one of three—that sits in the midst of Carpaccio’s designs, and in the midst of the art of Italy, a child playing a lute, one of the chief creatures of the work of line and colour. The Presentation of Christ in the Temple is going forward above; the three boy-angels are at their music, and this one, the most simply assiduous, props his instrument upon his lifted knee, and sedulously watches over his left-hand fingering. The incomparable composition of this figure owes nothing to any arbitrary ideal of form or action, nothing to the bodily grimace in which taste had resolved that the necks of saints, women, and children, in contradistinction to donors, must, for the purposes of art, be twisted. Venice thought a child to be a touching creature, thought natural action in a child to be not lower but higher than make-believe; and when to these new and imperial perceptions and convictions, she added the new perception of colour and tone, she proved herself indeed a great and solitary power in painting. The art of Venice, in the event, turned to the light, and set the darkened head of a man against the sun and against the cloud. I think there never was a greater new act in the history of art than this facing of the sun, this contemplation of the shadow side of things. Tone, with all its mystery, as well as light with all its mystery, comes about by that change of the gazer’s station. Did Claude “first set the sun in heaven”? Tintoretto was born nearly a century earlier than he, and Tintoretto did more than paint the sun, he implied it by the soft darkness of withdrawal or eclipse, by the half-light and the half-darkness, by the tenderness of reflected lights lodged within delicate shadows, or merely in colour by the Venetian presence of a latent gold. Carpaccio, and masters of an earlier date than his, had made the discovery of the profounder warmth of colour, or had perceived the value of that rich secret of the colours of the East. Carpaccio was—some of the Schiavoni paintings prove it—a colourist even in the great Venetian sense; but tone, in the great Venetian sense, was to be the work of Titian. In design, however, Carpaccio’s minstrel angel has a beauty and spirit that Titian could not rival, something of the freshness of the flower compared with Titian’s fruit, both rich and both fragrant, but differently. The Elizabethan lyric has somewhat the same relation of beauties to the lyric of the late seventeenth-century—Milton’s, Crashaw’s, Lovelace’s, or Vaughan’s: peach-blossom to peach, and Carpaccio’s angel to Tintoretto’s.

_Alinari_

TITIAN. “THE PRESENTATION IN THE TEMPLE” (Detail)

(VENICE)
]

_Alinari_

TINTORETTO. “THE PRESENTATION IN THE TEMPLE” (Detail)

(VENICE)
]

The persons of Titian’s children are those of the other masters—the Virgin’s Child, the little angels, the little loves, a Ganymede, a faun or sylvan—with the addition of the portraits of princes already noted, and the more memorable addition of the little Virgin. To the humming-bird angel of the Mysteries he gives no other character than that so familiar to us in all the schools, except only that with him the frolic movement looks more sincere; needless to say, the tone is more beautiful than anything yet known in the West. The little angels that fly below the ascending Madonna of the “Assumption” have Titian’s delicate darkness of shadows that are winged with secondary lights; if pearls had the colours of flesh, one would liken them to pearls. To the beautiful “Ganymede” in our National Gallery, at one time ascribed to Titian, is now hardly accorded the certainty of a pupil’s name; but we have possession of a part of an assured Titian child in the human half of the little satyr or faun who goes in the train of Dionysos. He is a satyr-urchin of the ways of the woods, an _enfant des rues_ of the forest and the shore of Naxos; he drags by a string the remnants and fragments of a sacrifice, as a child going on human feet pulls a toy horse after him, happy in knowing that it follows, as a backward glance now and then assures him. He does not laugh, but has a festal gravity as he skips that is perfectly childish. He is savage, simple, and idle, and has joined the rout of the progress of the god as a boy in London follows a show. The Venetian honesty and the Venetian freshness are manifest in this strolling, trolling figure of Antiquity and the wild coast. The beauty of the head and the dark eyes is unmarred by any habitual form of prettiness. The sense of childhood is sincere. If a child—or but a half-child—is to bear a part in the journeys of the wine-god, his Silenus, his nymphs, and his leopards, with clashing cymbals and outcries, this is the childish part—to drag something with a string. A Florentine would have made the little faun playing an instrument—he would have had, at the least, to know something of the cymbals or the triangle. I think that Botticelli’s _amorini_ sporting with the arms and casque of the sleeping Mars show less feeling for child’s-play. Titian’s faun is a child of sunshine, as is the beautiful god leaping from his car, embrowned with summer. Is it indeed of this picture (we must not doubt it) that Keats was thinking when he made his Bacchus, journeying eastwards,

“enough white
For Venus’ pearly bite”?

Keats was a great poet of the imagination, and would have been, with other examples and a riper life, an infinitely great poet of the imaginative and impassioned intellect. As it is, he is praised as a poet of the senses, whereas the truth is that his senses were not rich, but sickly. Of a fruit he loved the “pulp” rather than the “heartening savour”; of lips, the “pulp” again; of a woman, her “softling” hand and a “bleat”; of Bacchus his plumpness and the unsunned whiteness of his flesh.

Titian’s “Garden of the Loves,” or “Hill of Venus,” at the Prado, is a very beautiful picture, expressing the delight, that Italy learnt from Antiquity, in an infant court of the maternal Venus. Delight is perhaps not the word, for the pleasure of the Renascence in these frolic _putti_ does not reach close to the heart; it is rather a pleasure at arm’s length. The babes of this rich “Garden” are not drawn very realistically, but they are not falsified, and it is natural to find in them some likeness to the children of the fishermen of the islands.

It is in his majestic painting of the “Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple” that Titian has drawn his simplest child. The picture is a great state-picture, a Venetian reading of the Apocryphal Scriptures, and an example of the Venetians’ incomparable sense of the dignity of place and approach. Titian causes us to look upwards at his noble figures, his noble priest, and at their action, worthy to take place under the sky. Even in their modern decline and fall, Italians generally keep that sense of distant approach and room which is the most obvious part of Titian’s dignities; they still know the value of a staircase, which English architects, going, as it were, with their elbows close to their sides, have never had. The Italian takes measures at a suitable distance, addresses himself, begins spaciously to draw near. But the master, having this, had also a greater and finer feeling, and his architecture serves to lift the paternal priest, the humble girl, into splendid light and sight. The legend that gives him the subject of his picture had been illustrated by the masters, but not very often or by them all. We find it in Florence, at Siena, at Padua. It is amongst the miniatures of the Homilies of James the Monk in the National Library of Paris. Giotto painted it at Padua, and shows himself embarrassed by the little girl; Taddeo Gaddi gives her great stature and a small head, an equivocal figure turning on the stairway to take leave of the world; Giovanni da Milano has a simpler child; Orcagna counts strictly the fifteen stairs of the legend; Ghirlandajo shows a young princess of fifteen in a starred mantle; Sodoma has a child, tenderly relinquished by her mother; Cima da Conegliano and Carpaccio bring the scene to Venice. But it is not one of the habitual subjects. Its legend tells (by means of a “gospel” not accepted as canonical by the Catholic Church, and, therefore, so accepted by none of the sects) of the dedication of Mary in her early girlhood to the service of the Temple of Solomon. Some traditions add the miraculous detail of her infancy, and of her climbing the steps alone though too young, in the ordinary course of life, to walk; of the wonder of Joachim and Anne to whom their little daughter bade farewell, turning to them from the Temple steps. Titian keeps the tradition of her going up, and he makes her go alone. But she is no infant—a little girl of seven years or more, whose beautiful hair has had time to grow. With a charming symbolism, Titian has made the nimbus, worn by other Saints around their heads, to crown her whole figure, from head to foot. This is one of the few little girls in Italian art; and the Venetian has not taken that sweet opportunity with less than the simplicity of his noble nature; he has not taken occasion for a trivially beautiful, or, as we say now, a sentimental little maiden. He has made her nothing but simple in her loveliness; she is erect, a straightforward child, and with this the whole expression of the lifted head accords. The action is perhaps somewhat of another time of life, but all else is purely childlike, and incomparably sweet.

Much like Titian’s is Tintoretto’s “Presentation of the Virgin,” but the picture, and the figure, are less simple. It is still the most beautiful of his children, but, though somewhat more “touching,” is less great and less unconscious than Titian’s. It is wonderful that the two profiles, both so young and so little spoilt by posture, should yet be lifted up thus with a difference. Tintoretto’s picture, none the less, is a splendid one. It has more passion, more movement, and that splendour of the shadow-view in which Tintoretto surpassed Titian. The shadow-view is the luminous view. Best of all, the Virgin’s little figure going up the stair is directly against the sky and the cloud, whereas in Titian’s picture the child is backed by a pillar.

Amongst Tintoretto’s children are some exquisite Bambini. The new-born Christ of his “Adoration of the Shepherds” (in the Scuola di San Rocco), unveiled in a stream of lovely light by a most beautiful Virgin, is a sincere baby; so is the Child in the strangely splendid group of Madonna and Child in the Accademia picture. We have seen the Madonna’s Child in a thousand forms, and on the knees and in the arms of a Mother under a thousand forms; but Tintoretto’s Virgin and Child are both different, and fresh, as are Tintoretto’s “Nativity” and his most dramatic and solemn “Last Supper.” He takes very literally “a new point of view,” by placing his figures aloft, or his table in perspective, away, in a large room. True, Parmigiano has a Madonna and Child raised up higher than Tintoretto’s, looking purely commonplace and conventional—a revelation without alarm, an insurprising vision; but Tintoretto’s Virgin, against a visionary sun, sits as though no other had ever been enthroned, and holds a veritable Child, a beautiful and animated creature, looking downwards with an infantile impulse, full of liberal grace; the little head, in a Tintoretto radiance, casting a Tintoretto shadow on the shoulder and breast. Of this master’s “Massacre of the Innocents” and of the many repetitions of this subject in the Italian schools, I give neither reproduction nor description. The painters made this a picture of women, in strife with the assassins, rather than of children, and the character of children or their action is hardly in question; an executioner has them by the leg, or their fragments are on the ground. But Tintoretto’s picture at San Rocco—he has another at the Frari—is magnificent. With his characteristic tenderness he has drawn the little figure of a child that has crawled from the slaughter.

The last of all the examples of Italian children in this picture-book shall be a peaceful and emblematic _puttino_. It represents Paolo Veronese, “a noble Venetian,” but no equal to Tintoretto. The child has the Venetian sincerity; he is really burdened by his sheaf, and even anxious about the carriage, and is in his own rich person a sign of abundance.

Italy is said to have much sweetened and softened the children of the German, Flemish, and Dutch schools by her amiable example. She civilized the nations of children, fed them high, put an end to all crying and frowardness, sleeked them, and proclaimed a holiday in the nurseries of art. It may be so; but after this mission, she might have brought home a lesson, to make her own sweet humour more valuable. And one master of masters, Rembrandt, had nothing to learn from “_le clair génie latin_.” Velazquez studied Titian and Tintoretto; Reynolds studied Michelangiolo—where did he find the “Strawberry Girl”? Not in such a nursery as the Sistine Chapel.

If these pages are varied—in all their delight in the children of the arts—by some disparagement of a certain number of _putti_ who turn out their feet in a manner that seems but a poor improvement on the ways of Nature, no descendant exists to resent the criticism, for those children never grew up. But the little boys of the Della Robbias, of Giovanni Bellini, of Tintoretto, mortals, ideally sweet, have left their seed in “sub-celestial” Italy, and the angels of Botticelli never died.

CHISWICK PRESS: CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND CO.

TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE, LONDON.

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TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

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