(MANTUA)
]
With Bronzino, art in Florence enters on a new century; so does Italy.
Fathers and mothers desired that their children’s own childhood should
be remembered, and not merely childhood at its best. It is worth noting
that with the portraiture of children, the exaggerated grace is allowed
to rest, at any rate for the purpose of the moment. The painter is
persuaded, by the erect and forthright aspect of a living child before
him, to leave his tricks of posture aside, or to give them up to the
children of holier families than the best of the Florentine. The boy
whose portrait is painted is straight, or full-face, upright, thickset,
quite inapt to bend or glance or in any way to copy the ideal of
sweetness so habitual in Italian design. And with this fidelity to the
square shape of nature comes a certain severity of design, or rather of
composition, which makes it seem strange that Bronzino the
portrait-painter should be a pupil and successor of painters of the most
ideal boys. Nature is more rigid than Italian design of the
fifteenth-century and onward; for whereas the linear arts elsewhere and
at another time may be thought stiffer than life, in the country and the
age that were ripening for Raphael they were more lax and easier, more
_coulant_ and unbraced, and therefore soon to be more inelastic and
sickly, than life. Elegance and ease of posture in design run that risk
of dullness which awaits rhetoric in literature. When rhetoric has been
strained too much and too often its language looses elasticity; loses
the sensible flexion and tension that are welcome in the using; loses
the friction, friction of air to the pinion or of water to the oar, that
makes the using worth while. Relaxed imagery, or hyberbole, or literary
violence of any kind, is all too easy, as was the task of drawing water
in a sieve, assigned to the daughters of Danaus. We must pity them, not
because their work was hard, but because it was light. And so it is with
the Italian painters and the relaxed ideal they so long abused.
[Illustration:
_Alinari_