(VENICE)
]
Moreover, taking the suggestion of portraiture and its honest action,
and looking through the years and centuries before Bronzino, we glean
here and there a slight accessory figure, an incident in a composition,
which is childlike and looks solitary. An example much to the point is
Jacopo da Pontormo’s “Joseph and his Kindred in Egypt” at the National
Gallery. Here are the _putti_, ambiguous as usual, turning and running
in the way of Italian art; and here are in the midst two little boys who
are little boys such as humanity bears, children turning the way they
look and supplying no antithesis of the movement of limbs and head. The
boys, in fact, have been fighting; they are apart from the fluent good
and unclothed children; they wear street clothes and have less good
manners. They are possibly the first street boys of painting. Now this
group from the life is small and unnoticeable, but it has the sincerity
of portraiture; and, in effect, we find one of the two figures to be,
conjecturally at least, a portrait, and the portrait of Bronzino himself
as a boy! Again, in that very beautiful little picture, also in the
National Gallery, Ercole de’ Roberti’s “Israelites gathering Manna in
the Wilderness,” there is a stray infant not on artistic duty, a little
by-way child, quite insignificant except to the eye looking for life, a
little thing, as far as it goes a portrait; and distantly akin to
another by-way child, one of the most perfect children of any of the
schools—Rembrandt’s wonderful little spectator in his National Gallery
“Nativity.” This last looks over, leaning, at the Child lying in the
light, and the light shows us his own most beautiful and touching person
and the exquisite folded hands. What other painters did by rote, or with
habitual intention, Rembrandt did with actual intention. And there is no
surer sign of that immeasurable superiority of spirit and truth than the
power and peace of this mere action of looking-on, the action of a
child, under the touch of that incomparable genius. Dramatic, instant,
unconscious, and perfectly simple is the attitude of that little boy,
brought thither by the shepherds, leaning on his hands. And Rembrandt
leads him into the company of this volume; but he is an alien in this
Italian society.
One of the noblest of portrait groups by one of the noblest
masters—Mantegna’s picture of the “Family of Lodovico Gonzaga”—has the
portraits of two children at the majestic mother’s knee. The girl is at
play; the boy, with his father’s hands on his shoulders, has
extraordinary beauty of drawing and expression.
[Illustration:
_Tiberio Titi. Pinx._ _Walker & Cockerell Ph. Sc._
_Infant Prince Leopoldo._
]
[Illustration:
_Alinari_