It is the Raphael of children, and not the whole Raphael, that is in
question here; and any temerity of opinion whereto these pages may bear
witness will for that cause be more easily forgiven. The master whose
name is tender and august, sweet and venerable, in the ears of
generations in all Europe, added this or that to the arts of arrangement
and design, but he rather continued and fulfilled than renewed the
painting of childhood; he certainly did not invent the grace we call
Raphaelesque, for we have seen this misunderstanding and misconception
of childhood persist, before his date, in all the schools of the
peninsula; we have had it by rote, and the formula is known. In Santa
Maria della Pace, in Rome, Raphael has some loves or angels, part of the
fresco of the four Sibyls, figures nobly composed as design, but far
less than noble or natural as studies of children. One, in particular,
may be taken as the representative of the whole convention, and this is
his attitude: he kneels upon one knee, and the other corpulent leg is
bent, and its foot turned out excessively; the body is twisted from the
hip so that—as De Musset’s dancing-master danced—it should contradict
the turn of the foot, and it is also bent abruptly at the waist; and
this twist is wrenched aside again by the turn of the head and neck;
there are five zigzags, or perhaps one should say three zigs and two
zags; and all this elegance performed by a babe for whom those pranks
were never intended, for whose shape they are unfitted, whose mind could
not grasp them, whose spirit they do not express, whose simplicity they
violate, and for whose own honest graces they prove the painter
inventing them to have neither heart nor eye. Raphael was not that
painter, he had no kind of originality in the device, he fell in with
the custom, only carrying it, in this instance of the angel, somewhat
farther; but his was the propaganda which is seldom the inventor’s; he
imposed the formula of grace upon all Europe; he declined upon Canova,
upon Sir Thomas Lawrence, upon the Italian decorator, upon George IV.
True distinction, such as that of Sir Joshua Reynolds—true freshness—was
untouched by that sickly prescription, but nothing inferior escaped it.
It was the rhetoric of the body, it depreciated attitude. Chancing
lately to enter a Chinese temple in San Francisco on a great festival
night, and to see a priest diligently dancing to and fro in front of the
altar of his gods, I had one chief thought. The priest was, unlike the
men of his crowded congregation, a majestic creature, of stature and
spirit, with an oval face flanked narrowly by the long lappets of a fine
headdress. He danced long and fervently, with a whole code of actions
and attitudes altogether alien in our eyes and of unintelligible beauty.
And the chief thought of the European stranger was this—that here was a
grace in which Raphael had no part. Nothing I had ever before seen in
adult public life, nothing in church, street or theatre, on platform, or
on the trapeze, had been so unlike Raphael. There was nothing of Raphael
in the derivation of that elegance, not even the protest against Raphael
whereby the English pre-Raphaelites of the middle of the
nineteenth-century implicitly recognized, while they renounced him. The
Chinese priest was all apart from Raphael, and this was the thing that
struck the traveller—so long, so wide and general is the obsession of
Raphael in Europe, and the dancer from beyond the East and beyond the
West came thus far to prove another lineage.
[Illustration:
_Naya_
ANDREA MANTEGNA. CHERUBS (Detail.)
]
Meantime, nevertheless, there was always the child at home, the Italian
child and the English alike, visibly as free from Raphael as the Chinese
priest. Art, the dance, and the stage might take the sickly pose, but
the child’s body was free. And Raphael himself saw this. He was more
original when he drew children that were not, than when he designed
children that were, Raphaelesque. That is, he saw for himself the grave
childish glance and the huddled position of the Boy of the “Madonna
della Seggiola”; here is no twist of attitude; the head is aside,
indeed, but as nature turns it, and not for the sake of attitude.
Moreover, this is a clasped child, not one touched at the distance, and
with the unconstraining hand and the parted fingers, of Italian grace.
The Madonna of this picture is the most popular of all the master’s
Madonnas, but she is not fine enough to resist the wearying effect of
her scattered fame; her face, often repeated, grows tedious. But the
Boy’s head does not tire our interest and admiration. If we are weary of
the picture, we know that of one part we are not so, and that the
“Madonna della Seggiola” is at once a hackneyed work and a fresh.
[Illustration:
_Raphael Pinx._ _Walker & Cockerell Ph. Sc._
_Angel from the fresco of the four Sibyls_
_(Santa Maria della Pace, Rome)_
]
No less beautiful, and invested in the imaginations of some spectators
with greater nobility, is the Child of the Dresden “Madonna di San
Sisto.” He too is free from the Raphaelesque pose, and the childish
figure bears a head forced not at all from the character of its age by
its look of intellect and power. There is all the quality of a portrait
in that head, with its eyelids folded down at the outer corner—a not
beautiful but not ignoble irregularity wherewith the older masters would
not have had the heart to roughen the features of a little Christ. For
them were the long and fine corners of well-finished eyes. Raphael
probably saw such severe eyelids in a living boy; and in this picture
they make a detail of likeness between the Child and the most worthy of
the master’s Virgins. This young dark-haired woman walks all the ages
and all the spaces, and in some happy hour Raphael set on her arm his
single solemn Child. Only in the arbitrary and not very fortunate puff
of her veil is this beautiful group marred by evident convention. But in
the Saint Barbara kneeling below, in the two angels to whom she smiles,
Raphael turns again to the adulterated feeling of Italy. The two _putti_
have no more than a pretence of natural action—a somewhat deliberate
make-believe in the raised shoulders of the one, the huddled chin and
pushed-up mouth of the other. These _puttini_ are intended to be at
their ease, and in designing them the master has denied himself his
habitual grace; none the more are they true. For beauty and extreme
sweetness—mere sweetness—a foremost babe of Raphael’s is that of the
“Madonna del Cardellino,” who with languishing looks, and the attitude
of a woman, with projected hip and languid leg, caresses the bird
brought to him by a laughing Saint John. And of the _putti_, none are
more artificial than two in the “Madonna del Baldacchino,” who are
singing their parts from a scroll of music. Women’s attitudes again are
theirs, and women’s looks, but the women who should practise these would
be lacking in uprightness and simplicity.
See also the twist of the Bambino of the Foligno Madonna, who turns
shoulders, head, pelvis, knees, and feet in as many directions in a kind
of convulsion of affectation and grace; and the unchildish manner of
standing of the Child in the Louvre picture; all these are Italian
improvements upon a nature unwatched and neglected. The great time of
art is checked in its greatness by this figure of a child mishandled.
That it is not altogether a great time we know by the rebuke, always at
hand, of a living child’s authentic action and incomparable beauty. The
pride of the sixteenth-century is, in this sense, at the mercy of a
photograph.
Close upon Raphael followed the painters of Parma, more fluent, softer,
riper than even he. A reaction against Raphael probably strikes with
still more vigour against Correggio. Yet this last-named has more of the
false elegance in the woman’s action, and less in the child’s. The
smiling mother turns her shoulders and her head, but the Bambino is
often straightforward; thus Correggio tampers with the lesser
simplicity. He is fond of a dainty strife between the baby and the
mother, the one catching at the veil, the other checking the little
hands. For the famous _putti_ of Parma, with their exuberant and
sentimental prettiness, few men with modern feeling can have a warm
admiration. It is a surprise to find Ruskin owning a rich and gay charm
in these frolic children. Whether as pictures of beautiful boys and
angels or as a decoration, is a company of Correggio’s children in their
hide and seek what we would choose for beauty and delight? Were these
happy ends ever attained by means so conscious and so luxurious? We have
learnt, rather, that something more sparing is not only more beautiful,
but more joyous.
[Illustration:
_Houghton_