(SAN GIMIGNANO)
]
Masaccio yields us little. He was as much an adult as Michelangiolo; but
when he designs a little child it is with more feeling and less
condescension. I find a slight figure in the “Almsgiving” of the
Brancacci chapel, in the Carmelite Church at Florence, an infant
naturally unconcerned in what is going forward; in the San Clemente
paintings another child naturally clumsy; a Bambino clasping the
Virgin’s neck closely, at Bremen; at San Clemente, again, a doll-like
child on the shoulder of Saint Christopher.
In the order of time, Fra Filippo Lippi follows near to Fra Angelico,
being twenty-five years later in date of birth, but much more in the
consciousness and complexity of mind, and the learning of the art. With
Fra Filippo, as with many others, the child-Christ and the boy Saint
John are nearly the whole of childhood. In the beautiful Berlin picture,
the Bambino lies with one finger to his mouth, on a carpet of flowers in
a wood. The figure is infantine, the action infantine, but the grace is
artificial; almost as equivocal is the Saint John, round and youthful,
standing with his thin rod of a cross and his little pennon,
but—resolved to compass an Italian elegance as indispensable to
design—the painter has disposed the little legs in the attitude of adult
strength and adult idleness and leisure; no child stands so, in unstable
equilibrium; a child uses both legs in repose, and gets what grip of the
ground he can. It is evident that Filippo Lippi did not intend to give
the familiar way of a child, but the ideal way of a “San Giovannino” in
Florentine art. In a _tondo_ at the Pitti Palace, Fra Filippo introduces
the “Nativity of the Virgin” in the background of a “Virgin and Child.”
Of the new-born Mary in the distance there is nothing to say, except
that Saint Anne seems to be caressing the cheek of her swaddled
daughter. A little girl, of no obvious meaning, is also in the picture;
through an archway is seen the encounter of Saint Joachim and Saint
Anne, the tired husband welcomed by his wife on the steps of their
dwelling before the birth of Mary. The Bambino himself, in the
foreground group, is, truth to say, an ugly Bambino, in the painter’s
despite, seated in the lap of a very lovely and innocent Madonna. In one
of the most beautiful of Fra Filippo’s simpler paintings, the group at
the Uffizi, two angels lift up the Child on their hands, so that the
Madonna, in her charmingly elaborate veil, may contemplate her son and
pray with her two hands joined. One of these young boy-angels looks over
his shoulder with the wearisome Italian grace, even then already a
platitude.
[Illustration:
_Houghton_
FRA ANGELICO. ST. LAURENCE GIVING ALMS (Detail)
]
Benozzo Gozzoli’s seventy years were well within the quattrocento; he
did not see the summits of the sixteenth-century. In a symbolic
composition such as his “Saint Sebastian” in the Church of Sant’
Agostino at Gimignano, he gives to his children something of the old
conventional proportion. The whole noble gathering of heaven and earth
is, in this painting, arbitrary. Saint Sebastian is colossal, and
amongst the little people on their knees at his pedestal are smaller
people who are a kind of children, smooth boys on this side, smooth
girls on that. It is a singular Sebastian, free of all his arrows,
clothed and combed with decorum, his martyrdom finished, and the long
work of intercession begun. But Heaven is busy with his arrows. One is
in the hand of the Eternal Father; the seraphim hold arrows instead of
trumpets, and pierce with them the clouds of the floor of the skies; the
angels that crown the Saint hold the arrow and the palm; broken arrows
are scattered in the middle region, a flying angel snaps one in two.
With all this, the action is curiously undramatic. That amid a dramatic
people whose daily talk, whose voices, whose hands, are dramatic, there
should be painters so failing—and there are many—is hard to understand
unless we consider the embarrassment of the celestial company and
attitude—the real shyness. An Italian himself would call it
“_soggezione_.” And in fact he does lose something of his drama in talk
when he is addressing a stranger or a superior, and regains it instantly
with an almost grotesque expressiveness—for the tone of the voice, the
language of the fingers are more than fit—when he turns from the
stranger to say something to a fellow-citizen, or when he has to talk of
his own daily affairs. So Benozzo Gozzoli, whose upper angels have rigid
and unmeaning hands, and whose Christ and Madonna in this same picture
use symbolic but inexpressive actions, has more drama in the multitude
of the faithful on earth; and in the “Saint Augustine at School” he is
free and has the natural impulse. In the sad scene of the chastisement
in this picture is an urchin in a spotted cap, holding his inkhorn and
pen, who is dramatically admirable. So are the two boys on their way to
school, although they are doing little. The painter has intended—except
perhaps for a slight convention in the hands—to design childish
children, and to make them childishly beautiful. We see more of boys,
clothed and about their business, in Benozzo Gozzoli’s frescoes at the
Camposanto of Pisa than in a hundred years of the work of other Tuscans.
[Illustration: