(FLORENCE)
]
Finally, these notes on the typical children of Botticelli should close
upon the most noble composition known as “The Childhood of Moses”
amongst the frescoes in the Sistine Chapel. It is a part of the great
composition of the “History of Moses,” in which Botticelli painted seven
scenes from the life, or rather the early life, of the Patriarch—that
is, from the smiting of the Egyptian who had slain a Hebrew, to the
Exodus. The childhood of Moses does not appear, but the latest scene of
the picture, the leading-forth of Israel, contains the figures of two
children; hence, perhaps, through some misapprehension, the customary
name. It is the child who, without labour, bears the burden of all
pilgrimages, even that of the mere change of home; here are the people
going into the wilderness, and Botticelli bears in mind the children who
are to be tired and to weep upon the road. Moses leads out a little
company whereby the painter represents Israel. They are loaded with
their few possessions; and the foremost group is that of two young
unequal boys. The elder carries his bundle, and with the bundle a little
lively dog; the younger uses both hands to cling to his mother’s hand
and arm; he must make two steps to one of the men and women. He too is a
“fine child” of the time; but perhaps because the master in designing
this beautiful head did not labour especially for wisdom and the favour
of God and man, he has produced more simple nobility than in painting
many a child-Christ. The elder boy pities him, looking down with the
passionless aspect of _quattrocento_ feeling at the largely-moulded
infantine face; and the young one looks up with a directly sorrowful
appeal, but with beauty undiscomposed. Also in the Sistine frescoes is
Botticelli’s boy with a snake. It is evidently a fine figure, now more
than half effaced; the child, encumbered with an armful of grapes, looks
down at his leg, around which the snake is clinging. Professor Steinmann
sees in this design—and the likeness is manifest even in the present
decay—an imitation of the antique statue, “The Child with a Serpent,”
now in the museum of the Capitol. Botticelli, the Florentine, summoned
to Rome by Pope Sixtus IV., to work with Ghirlandajo, Perugino, and
Cosimo Rosselli at the decoration of those walls of his chapel which
Michelangiolo was not to paint, had the art of Antiquity before his
eyes, fragments of much that had been then newly shattered, relics of
ancient Rome, and some few of that ancient Greece of which Ruskin holds
him to have been the true citizen. He gives us this one clear sign of
his attention to the art of the past—the figure of a child. Leaving
Rome, he returned to his work for convent and church—the Madonna, the
young angel, the holy Child. He returned also to the study of Dante;
Vasari charges him, without reason, with giving to this literature the
time due to his art. Botticelli did, in fact, follow his own art
diligently until those last years which were given to the yet closer
practice of his religion.
[Illustration:
_D. Anderson_