(SAN GIMIGNANO)
]
He was, in a degree, dramatic; but if we take expression to refer to
the face, and to the eyes above all—“countenance,” in the
eighteenth-century, was much what we call expression now—then we
cannot say that he was the painter of expressive looks. That he could
be, in an infantile way, dramatic, he proved by the activity of some
of his little devils when the sweet Frate compelled himself to oppose
these symbols of evil to the garlanded representatives of good; and it
might be possible to find something a little dramatic in the movement
of those figures of trumpet-bearing angels by which his various and
most interesting art continues to be made popular. He has, in fact,
possession of a certain little energy of action, in the absence of any
changes in the wreathed faces of the blest, or in the still looks of a
Madonna. For expression he does little more than mark a harmless
forehead with a frown. As he took no part in the then modern search
for expression, so he took very little in the new knowledge of the
figure of children. See, for example, the children in the Vatican
picture, “Saint Laurence distributing alms to the poor and widows.”
There is sweetness in the Frate’s design of the four little ones in
this composition. The baby caresses his mother, a little girl looks up
at the beneficent deacon, a very good boy and girl who have received
their alms go away together with an affectionate little game, and the
painter has made them pretty to the utmost of his power, giving them
orderly curls, with a forehead of great height for the girl—and a
fifteenth-century painter could do no more than this for woman or
girl. But the proportions are nearly those of the adult figure, and
the little ones with their graces look like smooth-headed dolls. In
the “Madonna and Child” of the San Marco Museum at Florence, in the
“Madonna and Child” at the Uffizi Gallery, as in the same master’s
repetition of the same subject, the Bambini are little dolls—the first
an affectionate doll, full of something lighter than sawdust, sitting
on nothing, but still trying sincerely to lay a filial little face
against the Madonna’s cheek; the second a ceremonial doll, holding the
globe and giving the benediction, but yet all dolls because of their
proportions. In the most important of Fra Angelico’s altar-pieces—the
“Coronation of the Virgin” in the Accademia at Florence, painted in
1441 for the Prior Francesco Maringhi—two little children have the
middle place in the foreground; they are evidently introduced at the
suggestion of their parents in order to recommend them devoutly to
heavenly favour. They have been given into the care of two Saints, a
man and a woman, doubtless their patrons. If the Frate has intended
any portraiture, it is not enough to define them; they are merely
little Tuscans on their knees.
[Illustration:
_Houghton_