(ROME)
]
Portraits of children are found also amongst the Venetians of the great
time, for in Venice the great time was late enough to give effect to so
much of the pride of life as delights in portraiture, and so much of the
personal love of children as desires the portraiture of sons and
daughters. It is to be supposed that patriarchal love of children, such
as consoled the heart of Job with latter offspring for the former
destroyed in their youth, would not have thought of portraits. Some
centuries of decline from such simplicity brought about the portraits
painted by a little Greek artist for the tombs of Fayum in the second
century, and the art of portraiture seems often to comfort or flatter
some phases of national decadence. (Has not nearly this been said also
of music?) In Venice, in Spain, and in Holland, during the
sixteenth-century in the first nation and during the seventeenth-century
in the two following, there were great exceptions to such a rule.
Titian, Velazquez, and Rembrandt were no flatterers or soothers, nor
were their times poor. But Reynolds, though a great painter, painted in
no great century. The truth may be simply that portraits are “late,” and
that late art in Rome, in Florence, and everywhere in Italy except only
in Venice, is art that has lost irrecoverable things. In Venice,
corruption was prevented by colour and tone. While colour lasted in its
plenitude it borrowed the health of the golden sun, and the art it
filled with life could not die or see corruption. That Titian, being a
great portrait-painter, is a great portrait-painter of children might be
held on the strength of one lovely picture only. This is the beautiful
detail from the Pesaro portraits—the head in three quarters. And this is
the portrait of one old enough to be treated with the dignity of the
Titian quality. Titian, like Michelangiolo, was a painter of the adult,
and this one young creature whose face he has drawn so finely and in
whose eyes he has lodged so much power and peace, is adolescent. In the
portraits, also in Venice, of the two little sons of Charles V., the
master has sought to give the childish interest; but these two boys of a
great Emperor, made to hold their fruits, and a real sword as a toy, so
that they may look infantine, are obviously placed there as princes.
Unequal in height by a bare year, they are fellow-upholders of the state
of a court. Doubtless the technical critic would find the minimum of
Titian’s beauty in this group, as also in the portrait of the little
daughter of Roberto Strozzi, at Berlin. Here is that rare subject of
art, an infant girl, and Roberto Strozzi had wished to have his girl
painted in her simplicity. The child is not on courtly duty, nor clothed
like a duchess; her hair is short and undressed, her ornaments are
simple, and she has her dog.
Titian’s pupils, moreover, painted the portraits of children, amongst
them Paris Bordone, who leaves us the delightful picture of a boy in a
plumed cap, now at the Uffizi, a portrait once named; the accidents of
time have stripped it of its name and title, so that the little
soft-faced child, dressed with so much pretty dignity for the sitting,
appears in the catalogues as a “_giovane ignoto_”—the unknown youth
being about eight years old, his cheeks not yet narrowed from their
childish round. An unconfessed smile, forbidden to his dark eyes, is
lodged in the infantine mouth and chin. Paris Bordone was the
contemporary of Titian, Tintoretto, and Palma Vecchio, and therefore
belonged to the greatest time of Venetian painting; Palma Giovane and
Paolo Veronese were, by a score or two of years, of a later, more
artificial, and less vigorous genius. Tiburio de’ Titi was employed to
make the portrait of the infant Leopoldo da Modena, in the beginning of
the seventeenth-century, and painted the baby in the modern spirit. The
little boy with his counted dimples lies cushioned and covered with
embroidered silks, the hands and the feet shown as a nurse would have
them.
[Illustration:
_Boraccio Pinx._ _Walker & Cockerell Ph. Sc._
_Infant Prince Federigo._
]
[Illustration:
_Alinari_