(LUCCA)
]
Thus far these Tuscan children have been designed by “pre-Raphaelites”;
for the arbitrary incompleteness of the definition which the name
expresses is proved by the inclusion of Michelangiolo in those ranks.
But Andrea del Sarto was a Florentine painter born next after the
Umbrian master who was to leave so much corruptible, if not corrupt, in
the art of Italy. Andrea del Sarto improves on the graceful game played
by so many Florentines with the soft nude figures of the two children at
the knees of their mothers, Mary and Elizabeth. If the former Italian
painters had rounded the gesture, and bent the knee, and turned aside
the head, his design was yet more curved and facile. It was yet more
manifestly the design of the “sentimentalist,” to use a modern word not
very handsome in form, but necessary now that we have begun to unmask
and expose the character. In painting, the sentimentalist, all
preoccupied with the _banalité_ of his own device, had neither sight nor
insight of incomparable nature. Sentimental without sensibility, he kept
unwarmed the secret coldness and unmoved the obscure hardness of the
sentimental heart.
For, watching thus the artificial attitude rehearsed by generation after
generation of painters, I doubtless have dwelt too much upon the sin of
commission in those who attributed to little children these graces,
these rounded elbows, and these legs placed like those of a club-man
standing to talk before a stroll. But assuredly it is the graver offence
of omission—“Ye did it not”—wherewith we have chiefly to charge the
Italians. They would not see the unconscious child, “the poor child at
his play,” as Henry Vaughan says, or the wayside nursling as he looked
every day, plain to be seen; they not only devised, but they neglected;
gave no attention to that simple and abundant beauty, that straight
aspect and direct gesture of innumerable children; and inasmuch as they
did it not to the least of these, they did it not to the Child painted
in a thousand pictures upon the Virgin’s knees.