(FLORENCE)
]
After Correggio the decline comes quickly; and the word “decline” seems
to express but ill the flimsy scattering of genius. For genius grows
thin, light, and cold, and wastes. Parmigiano, aiming at beauty only,
should perhaps have aimed at something loftier or further in order to
hit the swift and incontrollable creature. I cannot think that the
composition of his, held to be most beautiful, does cause the delight
that is the sanction of beauty. This is the group of eight young
figures—“Amorini Scherzanti”—of the picture in the Palazzo Mancini
gallery at Città di Castello. One of the eight is a youth, the others
are little rounded boys; the elder is Love, and the seven play with his
arrows. Nothing could be more purely a work dedicated to loveliness and
pleasure; and yet there is not a figure there but has, in spite of the
action, the movement, the sport of lines, an invincible dullness. It is
not extravagance, it is not excitement, it is not excess, or dizziness,
or delirium, that chastises habitual pleasure in art, but only dullness;
and when children are made the ministers of that habit, the dullness
looks the more foolish. One of the Latin races, having the dullness and
keeping wit enough to name it, has the word for it—_banalité_.
Thus the figure of a child corrects and rebukes. The review of children
in art seems to promise delight and indulgence, but we find in it
various sentences of judgment.
In Rome, where all ornaments are cast into a certain mould, the
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century taste held upright things in so much
dislike that the straightest thing in the world, the chasuble of a
priest, must be caught in a gale, so that it should flutter with folds
like the scarf of a woman. A hurricane would hardly suffice, in fact, to
set flying this rigid Romanesque vestment, but there is no sculpture
where Bernini lets it hang plainly in the attitude for which it was
made. The inappropriate flight is much like the forbidding of the
Italian urchin to stand upon two simple and equal feet.
The word “after” has doubtless more significance when it waits upon the
name of Raphael than in any other of the conditions of the history of
art. To follow Raphael is to follow that which, in certain aspects
great, in certain qualities nobly ideal, in certain examples incorrupt,
was yet in a greater number manifestly and explicitly corruptible.
[Illustration:
_Giovanni Bellini. Pinx._ _Walker & Cockerell Ph. Sc._
_Angel playing the Flute._
]