(MILAN)
]
One age, then, there was, so little impatient of childhood as to make
perpetual that childhood on which the attention of its art was fixed.
The Infancy of Nazareth was to last for ever. We must not forget the
certain fact that while the painters of the early schools made pictures
of the Child in the Virgin’s arms they prayed to the Child himself as
though he had never grown older. The infancy they worshipped was to them
a permanent mystery. They were indeed in no haste to have it over. If we
often find in the fifteenth-century and the sixteenth-century Bambino a
lack of that which we call infantine, we must not forget that the
painters intended to paint an infant. A very “fine” one in the first
place. No gossips at a christening were ever so eager over the fatness
of a babe as were the masters. And while they intended to paint an
infant, it must not be a child new-born. They would not have him wrapped
in swaddling-clothes and a few hours old, but a full six months old and
with bared limbs, proved to be the finest child “in twenty parishes
round.” There is a Bambino of Giovanni Bellini, in the Brera Gallery of
Milan, in whom, at a year old or so, there appears a definite sadness,
with the signs of fretting disease in the droop of the rounded
cheeks—the cheeks of the thinnest baby are round, but the little spheres
are flaccid; so are they in Bellini’s Bambino, and the limbs are
helpless with fatigue. But this is a rare exception. We may take all
this vaunting of the fine child in the Italian school as a simplicity,
or else as a lack of delicate feeling. Children appeal to us by a
variant of the quality of pathos; for a certain time men and women loved
them best when they were to die like little Dombey. That temper is past;
but we, to-day, find a child who is to live, at least as pathetic as the
readers of Mrs. Beecher Stowe found a child who was to die; and
assuredly ours is the blacker humour, the more ill-conditioned
melancholy; but it is, with differences, all one pathos together, and
modern. The fourteenth-century and after loved a child (in the natural
manner) the better for being high in health and full in flesh.
And yet, after all this apology, I have to confess how seldom childlike
is the Italian Old Masters’ child. The collection in this volume
represents in chief part the exceptions. Rarely and most beautifully, a
purely infantile child—Bambino or angel—more rarely a little Virgin, and
almost as rarely a portrait—shows how suddenly a master perceived the
real character of childishness amid the conventions of his time and of
his art. The Della Robbias, sometimes Botticelli, and Titian in one
great example—these gave the childish look and the childish action of
which they were aware, one hardly knows how, seeing that both were
before the eyes of other masters unperceived. Even through Raphael’s
preoccupation of grace, which has inspired all dancing masters these
many, many years down to Alfred de Musset’s _maître à danser_, when he
told his maiden pupil that she must turn her head over the right
shoulder when her feet went skimming to the left, and over the left
shoulder when they had to speed to the right: “But, that way, I shall
fall,” says the _jeune fille_; “But no,” he replies, sketching with
agility a _chassé_, “Look at me, I don’t fall”; even, I say, through
Raphael’s attitude, destined to so speedy and so long and so Italian a
platitude and commonplace, a perception of the attitude of childhood
breaks at times like a natural action. But not once did it appear to his
followers. The slight corruption of the Raphaelesque attitude was one of
the easiest corruptions in the history of corruptible art. It suited
every tendency of the Latin mind and the whole school of ornament. Rome,
Bologna, and the later Venice improved upon the child of Raphael, used
him for the very structure of decorative composition—his curves,
especially the bow of his young figure, which supports the canopies of
thrones, not manifestly, as it was done by caryatides, but entirely by
way of attitude and composition. But for the plastic art—for the
exquisite art of Luca and Andrea della Robbia—a collection of children
of the Italian schools would have lacked much.
[Illustration:
_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.