ii!Wtit!Siil!KHi"» 'l!ii«WI!»!i|lfM!Wi(Hl!«B^^ .#' .11 "\ k:..j J. ■ttUISlKi >-].'•: «Ullt»ilir iiiiiaii*iiti^iiiiiii!iiiiiiS!aiiiii!iiiiiiiSii«iai(«^ THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESENTED BY PROF. CHARLES A. KOFOID AND MRS. PRUDENCE W. KOFOID ^^•y CHILDREN OF THE OLD MASTERS All rights reserved. CHILDREN OF THE OLD MASTERS (ITALIAN SCHOOL) BY ALICE MEYNELL LONDON DUCKWORTH AND CO. 3, HENRIETTA STREET COVENT GARDEN, W.C. 1903 CHISWICK PRESS : CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND CO. TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE, LONDON. /y]r TO THE PLAYMATES Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2008 with funding from IVIicrosoft Corporation http://www.archive.org/details/childrenofoldmasOOmeynrich CONTENTS Introductory ...... The Child of Early Art Tuscan Sculpture and Enamel . The Florentine Painters — I. The Florentine Painters — II. Portraits Siena and Umbria and Outlying Schools Raphael and after .... The Venetians I II 17 26 37 48 56 66 73 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS FiLIPPINO LiPPI ..... Giovanni Bellini. Madonna and Child DoNATELLO. Head of a Child School of Donatello. Angels . DoNATELLO. Winged Putti . Donatello. The Young St. John Donatello. Head of a Child Jacopo BELLA QuERCiA. Madonna and Child LucA DELLA RoBBiA. Sketch for a panel of the Singing LucA DELLA RoBBiA. Panel of the Singing Gallery LucA DELLA RoBBiA. Child with Flowers and Fruit LucA DELLA RoBBiA. Child with Flowers and Fruit Jacopo DELLA QuERCiA. Madonna and Child RossELLiNO. Madonna and Child Benedetto da Maiano. Madonna and Child Verrocchio. Madonna and Child Andrea della Robbia. Head of a Child Benozzo Gozzoli. St. Sebastian . Benozzo Gozzoli. St. Augustine at School Benozzo Gozzoli. St. Augustine at School Fra Angelico. St. Laurence giving Alms Botticelli. From the " Story of Moses " Botticelli. Madonna and Child Botticelli. Boy with a Snake . Ghirlandajo. Old Man and Child Andrea Verrocchio and Leonardo. Angels Filippino Lippi. From a painting of the Holy Family Lorenzo di Credi. Madonna and Child with Angels Rosso. Angels b Frontispiece Gallery PAGE 4 6 17 17 17 18 18 18 18 20 20 22 22 22 22 24 26 28 28 30 32 34 36 38 40 42 42 44 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Rosso. Angel playing the lute .... Fra Bartolommeo. Angel playing the lute Andrea Mantegna. Family of Lodovico Gonzaga Titian. Portrait TiBERio TiTi. Infant Prince Leopoldo Titian. Children of Charles V. . Baroccio. Infant Prince Federigo Paris Bordone. Portrait PiETRO Lorenzetti. Madonna and Child Matteo di Giovanni. Madonna and Child with Angel LucA SiGNORELLi. The Coronation of St. Cecilia PiNTURiccHio. St. John Preaching Pinturicchio. The Child Jesus and the little St. John Perugino. Madonna and Child, with the little St. John and Angel Andrea Mantegna. Cherubs .... Raphael. Angel (from the fresco of the Four Sibyls) Raphael. Angels (" Madonna di S. Sisto") Raphael. Madonna "with the gold finch," Christ, and Infant St. John Giovanni Bellini. Angel playing the flute Giovanni Bellini. Altar-piece of S. Giobbe Giovanni Bellini. Madonna and Child Alvise Vivarini (formerly attributed to Bellini). Angel Giovanni Bellini. An Allegory Carpaccio. " The Presentation " (detail) Titian. The Garden of the Loves Titian. The Presentation in the Temple Tintoretto. The Presentation in the Temple PAGE 46 46 48 50 52 52 54 54 56 58 58 60 62 64 66 68 70 70 1Z 74 74 74 76 76 78 80 80 The Photogravure Plates in this book are by Messrs. Walker and Cockerell, after photographs by Edmund Houghton and the Fratelli Alinari. The other reproductions are by Messrs. Waddington. Children of the Old Masters INTRODUCTORY NOTE HE making of images was, in an earlier world, so well understood to be for the sake of honour, that it was the act of homage which must needs be, by law, restrained. The picture, the statue, the doll are likenesses of things admired, and although a strange concourse of unchildlike children face us as we look at the pictures of the Masters, we are constrained to confess — seeing how his image is repeated — that these Masters admired a child, and that the populace of their centuries must have had popular admiration for a child. It has been left chiefly for our day, and for our populace, to make an image in irony, to clothe it in burlesque, to carry it in the procession of insult. There is but one day in the year on which the people, in London, make an image, and they set it up for the sake of derision, draw it through a November fog, hoot it at the pauses of procession, and, at the end of a day of contempt, give it to the flames. It is an act of idolatry ^ rebours, an inversion of the admiring motive of human art, an act of delight in disrespect not only to- wards something unworshipful on earth, but towards the work of the B 2 CHILDREN OF THE OLD MASTERS maker's own hands, to which the old and general art of caricature has no real likeness. For there is no ritual about the comic paper; nor is its illustration the work of the people, leaving for a day their labour of making or carrying merchandise to make and carry a work of art. Whereas they do deride the November image with a kind of song, and it is the thing of their invention, their burden, their own, thought out and put together and prepared to its unhandsome end. Thus the townspeople of to-day intend to tell us that they contemn — if contempt is the word — the notorious man, national enemy, or what not, and their own image of him. They do not express by means of an image what the makers love, like, or admire. But the images carried by the people of Europe in the thirteenth century and onward had no other end. The Italian schools of painting throughout that long evolution in which they travelled a great way in mind, a great way in time, but in place shifted only from Pisa first to Bologna last, dealt less with children than with one Child. An infantine figure was the very centre of their attention ; and this fact has certainly had an incalculably wide and persistent influence upon character, and therefore upon the course of history ; but it was not less an effect than a cause of gentleness and civilization. Art was a matter of importance in Europe for four or five hundred years, and during those centuries the centre of art was the portraiture of a child in a woman's arms. Our own day would not suffer such a thing. Misplaced irony, and the love and fear, at once, of a quite inappropriate burlesque would forbid it. There was, then, a straightforward, a natural sentiment, now vanished, in the ages that chose this young and helpless group INTRODUCTORY NOTE 3 for endless repetition ; albeit we call those ages violent. They had the whole Bible to choose from. The Madonna and Child look so merely a matter of course in the eyes of everyone who so much as knows the " Old Masters " by their generic name, that these modern eyes miss the impulse that once set the making of the Madonna and Child afoot. A manufacture it became, but it had a fresh beginning and a continuous sanction. The Byzantine who brought the first Virgin and Child into Italy represented what we should call in our modern way a public. In order to serve it he made these figures, in their simplicity and sentiment, the one chief preoccupation of the art of the new — the second — civilization of Europe. Yet the Crucifixion, the Descent from the Cross, the great masculine actions and com- positions, were not entirely postponed by this early art. There was no hesitation, for example, as to their difficulty, inasmuch as the first mediaeval sculptor was unaware of what modern art calls difficulty; he knew that his materials must serve him, roughly, in his approach to drama, and in his use of mere symbols, alike. Assuredly he had no misgivings as to the representation of the action of a Resurrection, to be indicated in unpractised and startled stone. It was not, therefore, for the sake of material simplicity that he and the painter alike chose the Madonna and Child as the first and the permanent group. We have to ascribe their choice to the inclination of the mind of the time, first in the country through which Greek art entered central Europe, and next in the countries that followed, while they altered, the fashion of foremost Italy. Let us grant that this love for children was less conscious, less deliberate, less meditative, and less articulate than the feeling which, 4 CHILDREN OF THE OLD MASTERS apart from the arts, we cherish now, but we may well insist that it was more serious. It was eager to confess the Divinity of a Child ; and it is well worthy of remark that art put out its hand to stay the passing of the Divine childhood. It took Goethe's word and cried to the passing moment: "Stay, thou art so fair!" And that moment was the moment of the Infancy of Christ. We are inclined, and with justice, to accuse our fathers — say our fathers of the seventeenth century and onwards — of considering childhood too hurriedly, too inconsiderately, as a passage. Had they known, we aver, of the law of unresting change, of the passage through which everything living, and even the inorganic creature, journeys alike; had they known that the very crystals have to grow old, they would not have been urgent, impatient, and in haste with childhood, as they certainly were, because it is but a state of transition; they would not have seen the character of transitoriness, which is everywhere, exclusively in human child- hood, and would not have reproached the innocent child with what is the universal lot. They thought great things of their own maturity, and hurried their children on to that state which is, after all, so brief that it hardly stays long enough to be known. It is wonderful that they should have been thus hasty with childhood, and so pushing to get it done, so ill-content with the state of the infancy of their children, in the age in which Reynolds painted the " Strawberry Girl," and later when Blake was writing. For the genius of the painter and the poet had an incomparable apprehension of childhood. 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 Alinari GIOVANNI BELLINI. MADONNA AND CHILD (milan) INTRODUCTORY NOTE 5 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 wor- shipped 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 nof 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 cer- tain 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 differ- ences, all one pathos together, and modern. The fourteenth century 6 CHILDREN OF THE OLD MASTERS 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 beau- tifully, 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 Delia 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, see- ing 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 mattre ci 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 j'eune fille; "But no," he replies, sketching with agility a chassd, "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 atti- tude of childhood breaks at times like a natural action. But not once did it appear to his followers. The slight corruption of the Raphael- esque 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 im- proved upon the child of Raphael, used him for the very structure of \i/en- UJaikMr^hocktrtio'^^'^^c cUMxJu .c^Me^n.uju' '^Jaifu^S'Socke^'&U'^LiVc ^^urdo// ////' c/ /^// t^n/JM . ROSSELLINO. MADONNA AND CHILD (south Kensington) Alinari BENEDETTO DA MAIANO. MADONNA AND CHILD (PRATO) Hovghton VERROCCHIO. MADONNA AND CHILD (FLORENCE) ■i TUSCAN SCULPTURE AND ENAMEL 23 perienced incident of old age. The one and the other were modelled in these terra cotta busts from life. Luca della Robbia observes also the weakness of the soft mouth of childhood, with the underlip a little sucked in ; he models the lips lightly and feebly apart, in two of the portrait-busts at South Kensington. Domenico da Capo d'Istria has a fine erect Bambino, as upright in his spirit as in his attitude; no twist, no head aside is his; and Mino da Fiesole is equally frank in his Saint John the Baptist. These are examples, and no more, representatives of a great school of natural art that lasted nearly a century in Italy. Luca della Robbia is simple, but Andrea della Robbia, in the succeeding generation, is more divinely simple yet. It would be difficult to place him " later " in spirit than his elder. In such a detail as the treatment of the framing wreaths of close leaves and fruits, he keeps the rich severity of the natural design. Giovanni, the third of the name, lost the severity. And Andrea, in his groups of Madonna and Child, rejects everything that is less than perfect ; here is the blue ground, here the lovely Virgin and the lovely Child — two tranquil heads, the veil, the hands, and a few straight summer clouds lying in a blue sky. The altar-piece, probably by him, which represents the Madonna giving her girdle to Saint Thomas in a vision after the Assumption, has a tnandorla of little angels' heads, and in another beautiful relief they are yet more various — a canopy of delicate portraits with the childish gravity and the childish laugh and the incidents of vital likeness. The " Madonna of the Cushion," at Palermo, is crowned with five such portraits of living angels. It is worth noting, too, how well this master observed the childish 24 CHILDREN OF THE OLD MASTERS figure, for in one of the medallions for the Hospital of the Innocents he shows the slight infantine narrowness across the body just under the arms. To the works of these great artists must be added some terra cottas to which no name has been assigned — a fine Florentine boy looking out broadly — called, like most of these portrait-busts, Saint John the Baptist; a beautiful Bacchic cupid, also Florentine and fifteenth-century. But the cupids are few in this art, which was altogether natural and sacred. Before ending this glance at the children of Italian fifteenth- century sculpture, let a brief word be said of one child by the sixteenth- century master, the master of masters, Michelangiolo. His bas-relief in the National Museum at Florence is a tondo which contains the whole figures of Mother and Child, because she sits crouching with her feet drawn back, and the curve of the little figure of the child- Christ holds just within the circle. The master has not intended to give any childish action to this childish form. With the artificial action and attitude of a man, the Infant leans one elbow on his mother's open book, and his head on his hand. Nor is the Infant of the famous Bruges Virgin less unchildlike. It is not to Michelangiolo that we must look for a child indeed. From the meek masters of a hundred influential years before, the passage is not less than disastrous to this arrogant work of a greatness o'er-leaping itself and falling into a sort of sickliness. But there is another step to be taken from the noble presence of Donatello, the Delia Robbias, Desiderio da Settignano, Pellegrini, Benedetto da Maiano, Jacopo della Querela, and the rest of that com- pany ; it is the step into the nineteenth-century tea-room under the ANDREA DELLA ROBBIA. HEAD OF A CHILD (FLORENCE) TUSCAN SCULPTURE AND ENAMEL 25 same roof at South Kensington. This is a room decorated in enam- elled terra cotta, Luca della Robbia's imperishable happy material, from top to bottom, in singularly distressing colours and designs of which the figures of children form a part— /? > B < cu it, w z < o en en o 05 THE FLORENTINE PAINTERS— II 47 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 hand- some in form, but necessary now that we have begun to unmask and expose the character. In painting, the sentimentalist, all preoccupied with the banality of his own device, had neither sight nor insight of incomparable nature. Sentimental without sensibility, he kept un- warmed 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 EVERTHELESS, 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 Delia 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 Querela, 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 nderson ANDREA MANTEGNA. FAMILY OF LODOVICO GQNZAGA (Detail) (mantua) PORTRAITS 49 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 in- dividual 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 sub- dued 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 tran- quillity 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 bvoccato, 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 H 50 CHILDREN OF THE OLD MASTERS mere simple fact is close to one of the sources of the " tears of things." With Bronzino art in Florence enters on a new century; so does Italy. Fathers and mothers desired that their children's own child- hood 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, thick- set, 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 A linai i TITIAN. PORTRAIT (VENICE) PORTRAITS 51 literary violence of any kind, is all too easy, as was the task of draw- ing 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. 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 52 CHILDREN OF THE OLD MASTERS 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. 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 ::§ 3^, Alinati TITIAN. CHILDREN OF CHARLES V. (rome) PORTRAITS 53 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 54 CHILDREN OF THE OLD MASTERS 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, for- bidden 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 cen- tury, 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. 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 metro- politan locus of Raphael is in question. By the time that Baroccio ' "■ -rTTtC^U>. y^i/I-06 iiiMij-&eoc*juvM,^h.Sc ir»U.Pk.c)''c ^/riOyeX ^i/xiuorm^ y/A^y ^yAu^i'. THE VENETIANS ENICE 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 Tin- toretto 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 L 74 CHILDREN OF THE OLD MASTERS 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 Aliu GIOVANNI BELLINI. ALTAR-PIECE OF S. GIOBBE (Detail) (ve.mce) GIOVANNI BELLINI. MADONNA AND CHILD (VENICE) Alin ALVISE VIVARINl (formeily attributed to Bellini). (Venice) ANGEL THE VENETIANS 75 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. 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 dis- pleases 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 76 CHILDREN OF THE OLD MASTERS 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. Also to Giovanni Bellini's noble hand do we owe the group of three young ones — children they are hardly — playing their instru- ments 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 o w < < w 03 s > o o < Z w (/) w -S- W > H u < a: < THE VENETIANS 77 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 "Annun- ciation," 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 78 CHILDREN OF THE OLD MASTERS 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) THE VENETIANS 79 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 8o CHILDREN OF THE OLD MASTERS 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. 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 TITIAN. "THE PRESENTATION IN THE TEMPLE (Detail) (Venice) Aiinari TINTORETTO. "THE PRESENTATION IN THE TEMPLE" (Detail) (VENICE) THE VENETIANS 8i 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 Nation a 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 M 82 CHILDREN OF THE OLD MASTERS 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 /i/ui^ui4j .-£ui^4j^.,y-infx zJCUiT^a,' ':jh/mXl/U' . THE VENETIANS 83 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 84 CHILDREN OF THE OLD MASTERS 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 some- what 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. THE VENETIANS 85 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 in- surprising vision ; but Tintoretto's Virgin, against a visionary sun, sits as though no other had ever been enthroned, and holds a verit- able 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 exe- cutioner 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. 86 CHILDREN OF THE OLD MASTERS The last of all the examples of Italian children in this picture- book shall be a peaceful and emhlemaXic puff mo. 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 " /e clair gdnie 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 Delia 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. UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY BERKELEY Return to desk from which borrowed. This book is DUE on the last date stamped below. I4Aiig»50Wff i llMay'57LS REC'D L-D 290ct'57H?/l 9 JUL'59WW RET^D CD JUN25 1959 LD 21-100m-ll,'49(B7146sl6)476 VF 00650 ivi317684