When Domenico Ghirlandajo painted for the church of Santa Maria Novella
the stateliest of all the Nativities of Mary, arranging the scene in a
palace chamber and admitting a company of Florentine ladies to
congratulate Saint Anne, he crowned the decorated room with a frieze of
nude children at play. They are the _putti_ of whom art, by that time,
had made an established convention, and of whom in time to come art was
to make a continual commonplace. Something in these equivocal children,
infantile and yet not infantile, graceful as the adult would have them
and corpulent as the gossip would have them, so took the fancy of Italy
as to make a rule and an example for centuries. Your Italian
house-decorator to-day is fairly able to make you a design of _putti_,
dolphins, and garlands after the manner of the fifteenth-century. The
child in question has become a kind of repeating pattern, and he owes
his long life in art, through high times and decadent, to a love of the
beauty of children that was an incomplete love, or one might rather say
a love that filled completely the capacities of a somewhat shallow
heart—like, _d’ailleurs_, some Italian music. Yet it is to Ghirlandajo
that we owe one of the most direct and sincere children of that time or
the times following, one of the best children of Tuscan art, whom Parma,
Rome, nor Bologna was to match. This is the child who loves the
bottle-nosed man in Ghirlandajo’s beautiful picture, a charming child
exceedingly urgent yet gentle, with the little childish upper lip out,
and the lower lip soft. The man loves him, and is a sweet old man, as
gentle as the boy, and the two profiles turn to each other, records of a
tenderness certainly alive four hundred years ago. In his noble
“Adoration of the Kings” (Chapel of the Innocenti, Florence), with its
glorious company of visitors at the shed of the Nativity, and its great
animated landscape of river and mountains, Ghirlandajo has made the
unusual introduction of two little boys amongst the worshippers. They
seem to be little Florentines rather than little angels, and each kneels
meekly on both knees. Saint John the Baptist brings one, and a bearded
Saint whom I do not recognize brings the other. The same master treats
“The Espousals” as a festival ceremony under the arches of a great
palace court. With all possible simplicity and gravity he deals with the
grotesque incident of the spite of Mary’s rejected suitors—an incident
that seems to have been added to the tradition by the busy fancy of
painters; for many of them represent it: one of the young men, in the
extremity of his disappointment, deals Saint Joseph a hearty blow on the
head at the moment of the marriage benediction. What is to the present
purpose is that Ghirlandajo gives a kind of under-plot to his
composition by the brisk movement of children. A little girl whisks,
much excited, into the picture with her mother, to see the wedding; two
other little girls run in from the other side.
[Illustration:
_D. Anderson_