(ROME)
]
Filippino’s angels in his great Cistercian picture, “The Vision of Saint
Bernard,” are young; their stature is more childish than the character
of their heads, and they are moreover bent, so that the erect figure of
Mary may have a foil. They share something of the commonplace of angelic
beauty, as the rocks under which Saint Bernard sits writing at a rustic
desk have the commonplace of an unobserved nature, being designed by the
hand of a man who never cared to see a rock or a wayside stone as it is.
The chief beauty of this work is in the tender and majestic figure and
countenance of Saint Bernard. It is perhaps worth noting that in drawing
his angels on a moderately small scale Filippino Lippi followed, with
his later feeling, a convention of his predecessors, who frankly varied
the scale of their figures. I have not called certain companies of
angels children, because they were rather small than young, designed to
give dignity to a great Madonna. They have no part in this volume.
Lorenzo di Credi’s gentle designs have their differences amongst the
works of other minor Florentines of the second half of the
fifteenth-century, but those differences, though visible, are not easily
to be described. He seeks for all possible expression in his young
angels, expression of devotion and sweetness, and places a
representative of the impetuous seraphim and of the thoughtful cherubim
on either side of a tranquil Mother and Child: young angels of fourteen,
small-headed, and on a small scale. Lorenzo di Credi’s variants of these
well-known creatures are sleeker and more smooth than others. Though a
Florentine citizen and the pupil of a Florentine, he is even less
distinctively Tuscan than Leonardo da Vinci, who was his fellow-pupil in
Verrocchio’s workshop.
[Illustration:
_Rosso, Pinx_ _Walker & Cockerell Ph. Sc._
_Angels._
]
Younger, more childlike, and nearer to nature than the young adolescent
angels of contemplation are the little musicians. They are less smooth,
more active, and busy with their strings. The players and singers of the
earlier masters produced their music with an angelic ease and
carelessness of method; but the child of the later school is industrious
and able. He is the pleasant fiction of a day in which simple action had
begun to amuse or attract the painter’s eye, in which the pencil paused
with pleasure upon the way of a player with a lute and the incidents of
the fingering. To feign the musicianly activity of a little child, to
bend a babe’s hand to the strings or to put his small mouth to the
recorders, was a game that pleased the fifteenth-century in Italy; it
was such a mixture of realism and miracle as took the fancy of the time.
One is reminded of the distant, different northern fancy, the mixing of
observed fact with a pathetic convention in the insanity of the tragic
stage, the sweetness of an innocent intelligence astray, the favour and
the prettiness of the distracted woman. Carpaccio, Bellini, Bonifazio
Veronese, Fra Bartolommeo, Frate Antonio the Olivetan, Rosso Fiorentino,
are but a few of the painters, major and minor, who have put instruments
into these infant hands; gross hands of natural-unnatural _putti_ are
some of them, and some again are animated with an eager grace. Frate
Antonio gives to one fleshly babe (standing with one bent leg, for
elegance) a triangle, and to another a flute; Bonifazio puts a large
lute into the round arms of a winged musician; Raphael (in the “Madonna
del Baldacchino” at the Pitti Palace) gives to two corpulent little
boys, in attitudes both adult and effeminate, a scroll to sing from;
Rosso gives us a sudden delight in the impetuous head of his
_angioletto_ with the cheek pressed upon the lute, the mouth close to
the strings, the wings erect and the wild hair; Fra Bartolommeo makes
his beautiful winged boy, in the cathedral at Lucca, a singer to his
lute; Carpaccio’s middle child in the “Presentation of Christ,” one of
the loveliest figures in Venetian art, is intent upon his lute.
Fra Bartolommeo’s boy is as much unlike a human child as might be one of
the fifteenth-century heavenly choir, no more. He is not grown up, but
has an alien felicity and sweetness in his beautiful eyes and in his
majestic action. Here is expression, and here is a childish abundance
fairly accordant with nature at her richest. Fra Bartolommeo, the
Dominican successor of Fra Angelico after nearly a hundred years, is
generally of a cold nature; his nobility of composition has a look of
unheavenly state. He does not stoop, it is true, to the demonstrative
and obvious dignities and graces practised sometimes by greater masters
in the “late” period of Florentine art about to set in when he was
painting. His design is too haughty for that consciousness, but the
haughtiness is somewhat mundane. His work does not make that grave
appeal to tenderness of which all art before the latter half of the
_quattrocento_ was full—architecture, sculpture, painting, music—or at
any rate we in our day think it to have been thus full, and take upon
ourselves the reply of sensibility. If we were children we should call
him “grand,” with the protest implied in that childish word. When we
were young, he seemed the most unsympathetic of the masters of the great
time; and the English pre-Raphaelites doubtless renounced him as flatly
as any master one could name. Yet, for all the chill, for all the
gesture, for all his entirely adult spirit, he could design so beautiful
a natural thing as this minstrel child. It is not a figure of the divine
beauty of Carpaccio’s angel also playing his instrument in the
foreground of a Mystery; and the difference is one evidently of genius
or inspiration; but short of the wilder and simpler loveliness of the
Venetian’s child, the Florentine’s is a noble creature.
[Illustration:
_Houghton_