(LOUVRE)
]
Young if not infantine angels are in the picture by Leonardo da Vinci
and Verrocchio—a beautiful detail of which is detached here. The heads
are lovely and noble, the nearer all-eloquent, with sweetness, eagerness
and tranquillity at once in the expression—the “countenance”—of all the
mobile features, the quick mouth and the eyes a little caught up with
dramatic impulse of feeling. (It is this angel that is judged to be
Leonardo’s most certain share in the picture.) If the first young
creature is hardly a child, the second angel is younger, as he is also
graver. Both are in a profound and tender ecstasy, but the angelic
nature differs, as though these were children indeed, and had their
human inheritance of character. Both are loving and both are
intellectual, but the elder resembles the loving seraphim, and the
younger the wise cherubim, as the Doctors of the Church divided them.
The Florentine painters were theologians one and all.
Among Leonardo da Vinci’s innumerable and admirable designs is the head
of a child, here reproduced, beautiful in drawing, with the solid of the
round cheek and the strong lines of the curved eyelids. The master’s
hand has so carefully followed the thin curls of soft hair in this study
from life, that a writer on the spiral forms of art and nature has
attempted to give unlooked-for significance to those touches. Nay, he
sees in one or two spiral curls on the middle forehead, where a baby’s
scanty hair is a little thicker, evidence that Leonardo da Vinci built
the spiral staircase at Amboise. However this may be, here is a child’s
head that is indeed a child’s, childish in such observed details as the
fullness over the upper eyelid, and the infantine parody of the line of
age beneath the under; purely a baby’s head, untouched by the
fifteenth-century prejudice, and we know that it is thus untampered with
because it is only a head, and goes no further. Were there so much as a
line to indicate the shoulders!—nay, it is easy to draw, in fancy, the
suggestion of shoulders turned aside in the fifteenth-century manner, in
an attitude at odds with the character of the face not many months old.
Amongst Leonardo da Vinci’s Bambini there is one to whom the master has
manifestly intended to present the lowliest homage of extreme old age.
This is the child-Christ of his “Adoration of the Kings” at the Uffizi.
There is the customary twist and curve of adult and conscious elegance,
and the Child shares it with his mother, but the group is a lovely one.
At the feet of the Virgin the Wise Men are prostrate; one,
white-bearded, kisses the green grass; another, crouching, raises
himself on one hand to offer his gift of gold; and this the Child
stretches a hand to touch in sign of acceptance.
[Illustration:
_Alinari_
ANDREA VERROCCHIO, AND LEONARDO. ANGELS FROM “THE BAPTISM OF CHRIST”
(Detail)
(The foremost figure probably painted by Leonardo)
(FLORENCE)
]
It would be too rash to question the change of attribution whereby the
“Christ disputing with the Doctors,” in the National Gallery, has been
withdrawn from Leonardo da Vinci and given to Luini. Yet, questions of
execution apart, those doctors to the right have much of the Leonardo
caricature, the short profile in particular. And an inexpert but
observant eye may see Leonardo da Vinci also in the smoothness and
relief; in the type of the figure of Christ, too, the master’s design
and his taste look well-known. But whoever painted this once famous
picture, having to paint the Saviour at twelve years old, was not
content with that age, but added some years. Dramatically, the figure is
lacking, but lacking in the manner to which the work of masters has
accustomed us. Often do the dramatic Italian hands fail us in their work
in the schools, and nowhere do they fail us more languidly than in the
hands they painted. The merest wayside theatre in Italy shows us the
living language of the hands; yet the painter of “Christ disputing with
the Doctors” has devised no better action for a disputant than this of
checking off arguments in order, with the fingers of the right hand upon
the fingers of the left. There is no weaker presentation of a course of
reasoning. But the National Gallery has now a Leonardo da Vinci of
somewhat more authority, a variant of the picture in the Louvre, the
“Madonna of the Rocks.” The sweetness of the two children here is
perhaps the best character that the master intended to bring about in
any Christ or Saint John known to be his. The little Baptist prays with
folded hands, kneeling, as no young child ever knelt in life, upon one
knee. The Madonna draws him prettily nearer, with her hand on his
shoulder, to her own Child, who gives him the benediction. A young angel
attends on the child-Christ, and in the French picture points to the
praying Saint John.
The nearest in order of chronology to Leonardo da Vinci is Filippino
Lippi, but this great and exquisite master is nearer to Sandro
Botticelli in genius. We know that Botticelli was his protector and
friend, and somewhat like his elder brother, inasmuch as both learnt of
the younger man’s father, Fra Filippo. The bonds of the three in their
art are signs full of interest, not only for the modern measuring expert
student, but for the plainer pilgrim in the galleries. They loved alike
the half-grown angel who may barely enter this book’s company of
children. Their Saint John the Baptist is much of the same age, and
sometimes may not be known amongst them but by his camel’s hair and the
long light rod of his distinctive cross. Filippo, Botticelli, Filippino,
and he who painted the National Gallery full-face Madonna, and he again
who painted the lovely profile Virgin, so long called a Botticelli, in
the Louvre, designed the same full bow-mouth, the same somewhat heavy
hair, but hair with life in its spring from the head and in the slight
final curl of the several locks. And the eyes are not large, under
eyelids that withdraw beneath the fullness of the orbit and the
high-uplifted eyebrows, and the glances are sidelong and most charming
and candid. Filippino Lippi did not generalize his companies of men, or
make them resemble each other; he distinguished, intently, head from
head amongst the old, but these angels and their friend the tender
Baptist are like one another in the sweetness of their touching beauty
on the fine edge of gaiety and sadness. Filippino designed now the
shorter face, with wider-parted eyes, of his father’s pictures, and now
the narrower and longer form of his friend’s choice, though always with
the eyebrows much above the eyes. Notwithstanding this variation, there
is rather a monotony of beauty in these groups of full-lipped young
creatures, tranquilly animated, with their obsequious eyes bent on the
child-Christ, or glancing softly aside into the world or into the
heavens, to see whether men or seraphim are aware of his greatness. In
the detail from the lovely picture in the Pitti Palace, which shows a
fair-haired angel dropping rose-leaves, the Saint John is much the
youngest of the heavenly children. A little of the camel’s hair on his
shoulder and his long cross mark him; he is quick and childlike,
dark-haired and dark-eyed, and his locks are somewhat wilder than those
of the angels, who are very trimly combed. The minister of rose-petals
wears, besides his beautiful wings, a glorious and elaborate dress; the
little downward-gazing one has sleeves of his pattern, the aureoles are
transparent but delicately patterned. In the group of two companion
angels, with the springing hair, a gentle difference of character in
seraph and cherub resembles that of Leonardo da Vinci’s and Verrocchio’s
pair. If we may place these delicate boys in the company of children, we
cannot count the Archangel in those ranks. Gabriel, though but a
celestial year or so more advanced in age than the young comrades of
Saint John, is a grown angel. Filippino Lippi’s Gabriel is an energetic
and most beautiful messenger, not so impetuous as Titian’s, who comes in
at a run, with fleet foot, open wing, arm aloft, and flying apparel,
under a bursting cloud, to a Virgin overwhelmed. Filippino’s announcing
angel is tranquil, but his action is direct and full of power. This is
one of the Saint Gabriels of art who kneel to the kneeling Mary.
[Illustration:
_Filippino Lippi, Pinx._ _Walker & Cockerell Ph. Sc._
_From a painting of the Holy Family._
_(Pitti Palace, Florence)_
]
[Illustration:
_Alinari_