(FLORENCE)
]
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
_mandorla_ 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 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.
[Illustration:
_Alinari_