Venice is not “after” Raphael. Her school is the only school of Italy
that bears to him no such reference. Its date, though later, has none of
the indignity of that sequence. It is true that the natural and
inevitable derivation, the heredity as well as the inheritance, from the
whole national past, helped the genius of the place, the genius of the
East, and the genius of the transalpine North, to make the Venetian art;
but Venice had no part in the general rhythm, the rise and fall. She
kept her own time and walked at her own speed. As her Tintoretto is not
“after” Raphael, her Gentile Bellini is not a pre-Raphaelite.
Moreover, she has this singular favour: that whereas other cities had
one inspiration, held it while it lasted, then remembered it, later
remembered that they had remembered it, and then lost even this “darling
of their widowhead,” regret, and, lacking it, grew fat and cheerful,
Venice received two inspirations. The first was in the time of the
Bellinis, and the second after fifty and more years, when, with the
birth of Titian, colour and tone, in a new sense, and as a new gift to
the Occident, began to warm our world. At the earlier date, as at the
later, Venice was original. No other master of his time was original as
was Giovanni Bellini. But more wonderful is the originality and
illustrious novelty of the late masters of Venice, contemporaries of the
decadent painters of every other city of Italy, from Naples to the Alps;
and it is to the present purpose that we should find the signs of this
fresh and imperial source of life in the painting of childhood.
Giovanni Bellini’s children are unlike those of the Tuscan and the
Roman; if, in his design, he does not attempt to transcend nature,
neither does he see her amiss, or force her. The Divine Child is studied
from the poor infant in the arms of the Venetian woman. She is made
graver and more beautiful than life, arbitrarily beautiful with her long
features, long eyebrows, and full yet delicate cheeks; but the Child is
made simply natural, and less beautiful than pathetic. Pathos had hardly
entered into the Florentine idea of the infancy of Christ, but it is
seldom absent from the Venetian. And this is not said on account of the
art of Giovanni Bellini only; the most pathetic child in our National
Gallery is another Venetian’s—the sleeping Child whose heavy little chin
is propped upon the Mother’s arm in Crivelli’s great gilded and inlaid
picture, in three stages, of the “Virgin and Child with Saints.” In the
midst of the “bearded councillors of God,” flanked by pontiffs, doctors,
and virgins, on the knees of the woman who was clothed with the sun,
lifted over some gold fifteenth-century altar, Crivelli sets a wearied
baby, not only tired but sad with his fatigue, slipping, all unbraced,
with his chin caught up; in the first months of a hard life, weak as a
spent wave, light, but too heavy for his own strength, sheltered from
privation and sickness by the depth of the refuge of sleep. There is
not, of course, the modern appeal of expression; the mother is tranquil,
and the child’s face locked in peace, but the painter gives to the
childish figure all the sadness possible with closed eyes.
[Illustration:
_Alinari_