(CITTA DI CASTELLO)
]
Clear, in all these devotional and beatific groups, is the anxious
preoccupation of the pencil in search as eager as a child’s for beauty
of face and figure. The painters of the centuries of art and religion
had no other wish than to paint something beautiful; the objects of
their adoration and admiration were held to possess all beauty possible
to men and angels. They had no dealings with creatures imperfect and
marred, or subject to the waste of accident or crime. The devils were
invested with every sign of evil imaginable by the mind of man so many
centuries old and Italian, and their unhandsome figures introduced into
the very rare pictures that admitted them; but, apart from these,
everything less than beautiful and less than innocent was banished and
cast out. Until the portrait came to be more practised, when that which
modern feeling holds to be the best time of art—the time of the flower
rather than of the fruit—had passed by in the perpetual movement of
human things; until men began to desire their own storied faces and the
presage of their children’s faces to be secured in painting, there was
not so much as the incident of personality to engage the painter; he had
not the differences of the multitudes of the living to respect. He was
always bent on drawing a beautiful woman and a beautiful child;
secondarily beautiful angels, and next beautiful martyrs, virgins, and
evangelists. Saint Joseph was to be beautiful in age and Saint Sebastian
in youth. The fact that these centuries of living art were intent upon
the contemplation of moral good is perhaps too manifest to capture our
attention; we know the fact, and pass on; that fact would be wonderful
if only it were strange, for to this habit the custom of our own age has
no likeness. As steadfast as the morality was the beauty of the
aspiration common to all painters during five hundred years. But the
sincere spectator has to confess that the pencil, the hand, the eye, the
invention did not thoroughly serve the will. Matteo di Giovanni and his
contemporaries of all the schools intended to paint the most beautiful,
and the prettiest, faces they could by any means achieve. For fear of
loss of beauty they dared not forego anything of the prescription—the
long oval for a woman’s face with the arched eyebrows high above the
eyeball, and for a child abundant flesh. The sense of some failure in
the effect of this patient observance of the inventory of beauties has
obviously discouraged a master now and then. He was far too simple to
dread the name of prettiness, and he was sorry to miss it; missing it,
he sought at any rate for grace.
In the church of Santo Spirito, also in Siena, there is, attributed to
Matteo Balducci, a curious Tuscan picture—it is, if he is the painter,
Florentine, nevertheless it has something of the outlying provincial
manner in design and in the character of his Madonna’s face. The painter
surrounds the seated figure, rising from the symbolical tomb, with the
_mandorla_ of winged angel-heads, children frankly drawn from life, with
a careful variety of attitude. These little bodiless ones are a
characteristically Italian version of the prophet’s angels, each with
six wings—“With twain he covered his face, and with twain he covered his
feet, and with twain he did fly.” Italian art gives this angel no feet,
but crosses the lower twain of his wings under the chin, no doubt to
hide the decollation; the twain that should veil the face are open and
erect, for so amiable and so pretty a head is not to be covered, and the
twain that fly have little to do but to carry a strange little monster,
moth-like, on his fluttering way. Nothing could be less ancient and less
Hebrew. The bodiless ones became a commonplace of art, and their
strangeness soon disappeared in tediousness; in all dull art there is
nothing duller, and the little heads flutter, a proverb for absurdity,
and with the last inappropriateness, on the tombstones of the
eighteenth-century. One cannot easily believe that they were at any time
really interesting, and yet Matteo Balducci almost persuades us that he
liked them. This picture of his has, besides the six-winged heads, four
entire child-angels, winged like the commonalty of heaven; two wearing
the ribbons of Italian taste and running, each upon a piece of cloud;
and two standing as little guards before the vacant tomb, one rather
prettily alert, the other in an adult attitude of meditation which—one
would think—might strike even the simplest spectator as insincere. Saint
Francis on one side and Saint Catherine of Siena on the other
contemplate the mystery of the Assumption, and in the distance is an
ingenious landscape of coast and winding reaches of the sea. Triviality
and gravity, both of a kind alien to our thoughts, divide this design,
and many a remotely Oriental composition would seem nearer to our
present mind, more intelligible and interesting.
[Illustration:
_Alinari_