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Children of the old masters (Italian school)
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One age, then, there was, so little impatient of childhood as to make perpetual that childhood on which the attention of its art was fixed. The Infancy of Nazareth was to last for ever. We must not forget the certain fact that while the painters of the early schools made pictures of the Child in the Virgin’s arms they prayed to the Child himself as though he had never grown older. The infancy they worshipped was to them a permanent mystery. They were indeed in no haste to have it over. If we often find in the fifteenth-century and the sixteenth-century Bambino a lack of that which we call infantine, we must not forget that the painters intended to paint an infant. A very “fine” one in the first place. No gossips at a christening were ever so eager over the fatness of a babe as were the masters. And while they intended to paint an infant, it must not be a child new-born. They would not have him wrapped in swaddling-clothes and a few hours old, but a full six months old and with bared limbs, proved to be the finest child “in twenty parishes round.” There is a Bambino of Giovanni Bellini, in the Brera Gallery of Milan, in whom, at a year old or so, there appears a definite sadness, with the signs of fretting disease in the droop of the rounded cheeks—the cheeks of the thinnest baby are round, but the little spheres are flaccid; so are they in Bellini’s Bambino, and the limbs are helpless with fatigue. But this is a rare exception. We may take all this vaunting of the fine child in the Italian school as a simplicity, or else as a lack of delicate feeling. Children appeal to us by a variant of the quality of pathos; for a certain time men and women loved them best when they were to die like little Dombey. That temper is past; but we, to-day, find a child who is to live, at least as pathetic as the readers of Mrs. Beecher Stowe found a child who was to die; and assuredly ours is the blacker humour, the more ill-conditioned melancholy; but it is, with differences, all one pathos together, and modern. The fourteenth-century and after loved a child (in the natural manner) the better for being high in health and full in flesh.
And yet, after all this apology, I have to confess how seldom childlike is the Italian Old Masters’ child. The collection in this volume represents in chief part the exceptions. Rarely and most beautifully, a purely infantile child—Bambino or angel—more rarely a little Virgin, and almost as rarely a portrait—shows how suddenly a master perceived the real character of childishness amid the conventions of his time and of his art. The Della Robbias, sometimes Botticelli, and Titian in one great example—these gave the childish look and the childish action of which they were aware, one hardly knows how, seeing that both were before the eyes of other masters unperceived. Even through Raphael’s preoccupation of grace, which has inspired all dancing masters these many, many years down to Alfred de Musset’s maître à danser, when he told his maiden pupil that she must turn her head over the right shoulder when her feet went skimming to the left, and over the left shoulder when they had to speed to the right: “But, that way, I shall fall,” says the jeune fille; “But no,” he replies, sketching with agility a chassé, “Look at me, I don’t fall”; even, I say, through Raphael’s attitude, destined to so speedy and so long and so Italian a platitude and commonplace, a perception of the attitude of childhood breaks at times like a natural action. But not once did it appear to his followers. The slight corruption of the Raphaelesque attitude was one of the easiest corruptions in the history of corruptible art. It suited every tendency of the Latin mind and the whole school of ornament. Rome, Bologna, and the later Venice improved upon the child of Raphael, used him for the very structure of decorative composition—his curves, especially the bow of his young figure, which supports the canopies of thrones, not manifestly, as it was done by caryatides, but entirely by way of attitude and composition. But for the plastic art—for the exquisite art of Luca and Andrea della Robbia—a collection of children of the Italian schools would have lacked much.
Donatello, Sculptr. Walker & Cockerell Ph. Sc.
Head of a Child. ]
The Bambino, the boy St. John, the little angel who hauls his brother by the hand in the “Last Communion of St. Jerome,” with all their kind, and the Loves of Titian’s “Garden” with theirs, are of course men-children. The woman-child is much neglected; but for a little Virgin at the knee of St. Anne, or a legendary Presentation of the Child Mary in the Temple, one might look long for a little girl. Chaucer seems to allot some of the economy of his tenderness to the little daughter of Griselda; but soon he makes her masquerade as a bride at twelve years old: and this was their way, in those days, in earnest, of suppressing the girl-child; they married her out of the way of danger.
“Have here again thy little youngë maid.”
Chaucer’s exquisite line, and the tenderness of the poem “Pearl,” must stand for the scantling of literary allusion to the woman-child of these many ages.
In a word, the thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries had a sentiment of their own for childhood, somewhat unlike each other’s, together very different from ours. We might be slow to accuse them, whether of error or defect, seeing that they cannot accuse us again. Nor had they the experience of our older age, nor the choice of spirits that lies before us. They were not aware of the turn human emotions were to take, and doubtless if they had speculated they would never have guessed prophetically at anything like the child of Reynolds, or the child of Wordsworth, the child of the Sunday-school, the child of Mrs. Turner’s moral tales, the child of Dickens, or of Thackeray, or of the American diarist, or of the naturalist who showed how the new-born could hang by their hands.
The children of the Italian masters for the greater part are such as the prejudice of the time would have them, graceful according to an adult ideal, fat and well-liking, and as beautiful as the hand could make them when the eye had not learnt to condescend frankly to the conditions of their life, whether in form or in action. The Greeks had been most reluctant to recognize the true form—the proportion, for instance, the relative size of the head and the relative length of upper and lower limbs. The Italians confessed the characteristic form, but clung to their own banal idea of grace, the grace that carries the head aside, the grace of the dancing-master; and imposing this upon the ultra-childish fat, the exaggerated infancy, the rolling limbs, of their bimbi, they created a little corpulent artificial figure, not like a man, not like a child, the pet of the ages that brought mediaeval Rome to the ground by the pickaxe, and set the seal of one style upon the city and world. It is difficult to associate the painting of Angelico or that of Benozzo Gozzoli with the neo-classic architecture; insensibly we place the painters further back, a step nearer to the Gothic, than the builders. We do so, that is, in regard to their Madonnas, to their Apostles, Evangelists, Martyrs, and Doctors; in these there is the upright spirit—they are “early.” Thus the arts are at odds, or look so, as to “periods.” But that impression disappears when we attend only to the Bambino. Here is full “Renaissance.” The Bambino goes well with the classic temple of the academy, with the portico and the pediment, even the broken pediment; he is of their time.
Amid so many little boys wearing their make-believe childhood in the posture of indirect grace that living childhood never assumed—a posture conceived in the adult mind before it was assigned to any picture-child; amid so many falsified little boys, stand the smaller number of authentic children. They may be gathered un peu partout from all the schools of Italy early and late; Florence yields them in the fourteenth-century and Venice in the sixteenth. The grace of life, as it were something unexpected, puts out its impulsive and simple arms, or a laugh breaks through. We find again the child whom the painters had a little outdone or a little altered for their art, but whose own incomparable charms meanwhile had never flagged. It had doubtless been dear to women, in private, outside of the schools, renewing itself in the freshness of the repetitions of human generations. If the thrush sings each song twice over, with the “careless rapture” note for note rehearsed, his indomitable little fathers had sent the same song afloat, with the same impulse of invention, in the course of centuries. Nor do the sallies of kittens change, and doubtless the sacred antics of the spirited Egyptian imp in ambush that is now a mummy were those which the kitten tries to-day under the spur of an old but unpremeditated joy. Children in like manner recapture and recapture the outbreak of their smiles and their fresh ingenuities of play. And the Italian master who has moulded his bambino heavily, creased his legs and puffed his cheeks so as to make him very much a child—a fine one, and has turned his neck, disposed his legs, and raised his eyes so as to make him something more elegant than a child; the same master, I say, sees at another moment the sweetness of the truth, and his efforts and prejudices are set aside. Could there be a better example of this repentance than we may see in the work of Raphael?
It may be necessary to say that the slight essay following is not a work of art-criticism, and less—if less could be—an historical study. It does but record some of the changes of sight and spirit, during the course of the five centuries of Italian art, in the contemplation and representation of childhood. It is therefore an essay on a subject of the designs of certain painters and sculptors, and not on their workmanship.
The Child of Early Art
In the ages that, since the Renascence, have been called dark, the scanty art knew but one Child, but this was virtually the first child in art—the first prevalent child. Whether we hold the art of the time between the fall of the Roman Empire and the entry of Byzantine art into Italy—the time that is darkened by the smoke of the destruction, and the dust of the demolition, of Rome—to be the last art of the antique world or the first of the modern world; a seed-pod or a bud; an art rigid, grave, and inexpert with exceeding youth, or bearing those characters because of extreme age; we find it separated from the past, and allied to the future, by the motive of its effort, by its desire, by what we call in our loose language its subject. That subject was chiefly the child-Christ in the arms of his Mother. When the linear arts came out of hiding in the Catacombs they came with this burden and for the sake of this. Learning has not said its last word as to the female figure so often traced on the subterranean wall—whether the “Orante” was a symbolic woman or a Madonna; she has no child. But about the woman with a child there is no doubt. A half-effaced fresco in the Catacomb of Priscilla has a singular, natural, vivid, well-observed Child glancing suddenly round from his Mother’s breast with animated eyes—“falcon eyes,” an Italian writer calls them; and this is from an early hour of the dark ages, and a mere scratch in a dark place. Since this Catacomb design has still a spirit, a vitality, a dramatic impulse that relate it to antiquity, then it is in these places of Christian sepulture that the old art lived its latest unmistakable life, and then passed into that ambiguous state I spoke of but now. For the falcon-eyed child is conjecturally of the early part of the third century, thirteen hundred years, that is, before Raphael; Raphael has much the same action in the “Madonna della Seggiola.” It would be too much to say that, except in sculpture, this vitality of childish movement lapsed during those thirteen centuries, passed, in linear art, from the nameless hand of the Christian in the Catacomb into the glorious hand of Raphael on the summits of sixteenth-century Rome; but it might almost be said. For in the pre-Raphaelite painted Bambini there is something less quick, less instant, than in the little head of the Catacomb of Priscilla, and in the little head of Raphael’s picture.
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