The sculptors had recognized the form and proportion of the childish
figure, and, more, the incidental characters of the units of childhood.
The heavenly Della Robbias had nothing left unlearnt that their art
needed to know of nature. But when painting, belated, began to represent
the figure, it looked backward to its few examples, chiefly the mosaics,
and adopted their bantling, the small-headed child, the son of Greek
tradition, whose second life in the early Renascence in Italy was due
perhaps to a corrupt following of Greece (one cannot say of Greek art in
the “Laocoon,” for that very late Rhodian work was not unburied until
the sixteenth-century), perhaps to some authentic ignorance appropriate
to the inexpert art of painting. However this may be, here are painters,
contemporary with our sculptors, reverting to the conventional child of
the _bassi tempi_. Not only Cimabue did this, but Fra Angelico, and
sometimes Benozzo Gozzoli. Fra Angelico is in all respects a man of a
certain character rather than a certain date. He was early in character,
and should perhaps have had his place in the preceding chapter, in spite
of the prevalent sentiment that honours him as one of the masters of the
noblest Florentine school. It is at least a tenable opinion that
Masaccio was the first great Florentine painter; that Giotto is to be
judged, for all his genius, and despite the certain truth that he takes
the longest stride set by any man in the course of modern art, with
indulgence; whereas Masaccio is absolutely a great designer. As for Fra
Angelico, we have to remind ourselves that more than a hundred years lie
between his birth and Giotto’s. That his painting was an untimely
contemporary with the enamel of Luca della Robbia we have already
wondered to observe. And being thus passed on the road, Fra Angelico
shows the lagging of his art—lagging, with all its beauties—to be
different from the custom of his time, or from that just about to
develop, chiefly in two things, facial expression and the natural form
of childhood.
[Illustration:
_Alinari_