(SIENA)
]
Luca Signorelli, born in another of the steep cities of the hill country
of middle Italy, into which the sun looks as they go up their mountains
by steps—Cortona—was one of the Sistine painters, but his best works are
at Orvieto and at Città di Castello. The “Coronation of Saint Cecilia”
is decorated by a number of _putti_ of the conventional kind, playing
with flowers which they hold with a detached little finger _en
minaudant_. At any rate one of them performs this action of Italian
elegance—the dancing-master again!—but another has a fresher and truer
movement as he reaches up to catch a falling rose, for the flowers are
scattered by the hands of the Virgin. Her Child stands on her knee to
crown Saint Cecilia, who wears roses for a wreath, as Tennyson has her,
and carries her organ-pipes and her palm. Crowns like hers lie at the
feet of Saint Catherine of Alexandria and Saint Elizabeth of Hungary.
The expressions of these and of the episcopal and monastic Saints
standing above is unequal—very sweet and still in some instances, and in
others somewhat conventional, strained in the manner that grows tedious
with a tediousness wholly of Latin race, the tediousness of habitual
exaggeration. That habit—exaggeration—has relaxed the whole language of
French religion, for instance; the French paraphrase of the Scriptures
is as it were an instrument with strings so loosened as to be incapable
of music or meaning. If the tense habit can do so much for a language,
it may well overtax an art indifferently vigorous.
In a picture at the Poldi-Pezzoli Gallery, Milan, by the Ferrarese
master Cosimo Tura, or more probably by one of his school, we have at
last three boys who, though nude and symbolical, are neither the _putti_
of the schools nor the angels of a sentimental Italian convention. A
young maternal Charity, seated under a few white horizontal clouds, such
as a tender blue May sky so often bears in Italy, holds a scroll-like
scarf for the rather aimless play of two of the boys, but the third is
really playing at horses with it; he prances and obviously makes a
horsey noise.
[Illustration:
_Alinari_