(VENICE)
]
Also to Giovanni Bellini’s noble hand do we owe the group of three young
ones—children they are hardly—playing their instruments at the foot of
the Madonna’s chair. Such a group of three was a peculiarly Venetian
gathering of the Society of the Mysteries. The ceremonial passes above—a
New-Testament incident, or merely the enthronement of Mother and Child;
tall Saints stand at either side, and the three, a little under
life-size, and of about the age of Botticelli’s younger angels and
Baptists, sit making music on the unequal steps. In the same Accademia
with this beautiful Bellini is the more beautiful Carpaccio thus
arranged, and other examples of this Venetian group of grace and gravity
are in the memories of all. Carpaccio followed Bellini after some twenty
years, and he evidently followed him in the convention of this trio of
strings. Bellini’s violinist is one of the most youthfully and freely
graceful figures of Italian art—graceful with what innocence of the
postures of the other schools! There is much difference between the
leaning-aside of this most beautiful head and the leaning-aside of a
Roman angel’s. The Venetian youth has a masculine rectitude; and with
this a glance of genius, candid and grave. Where, in Florence, are such
simple eyes? If he were more a child this would be the place to pause
longer upon their significance, and upon the heedless beauty of the soft
and spreading hair.
But between Bellini’s date and Carpaccio’s comes that of Crivelli, a
master of the period that was early for Venice, yet a contemporary of
Mantegna at Mantua and of Verrocchio in Tuscany. Something has already
been said here of Crivelli’s Bambino, the sad Child over-tired. In
another National Gallery picture, the famous “Annunciation,” full of
architecture, there is a glimpse of an inceremonial wayside child; and
for once it is probably a girl. A citizen or two passes on the noble and
narrow ways of the fifteenth-century city. The mystic Dove is coming
upon a beam of light in at a ground-floor palace window; within, Mary
kneels at prayer, and behind her are the flowered curtains of her bed,
its coverlet and pillow, brackets with vases, pots, books, a glass
bottle, a candlestick, a box, and dishes of majolica. Plants are in the
window behind the bars; above the room is a magnificent loggia, and a
peacock sits upon the parapet with a tail sweeping down to the
architrave of the Virgin’s beautiful door. Without, a street leads to an
archway, and beyond lies a stepped garden inclosed by a machicolated
wall. The herald of Heaven, on his knees upon the foreground pavement,
has a twisted feather fastened to the jewel in his cap, a chain of gold,
plumes upon his shoulder, and acanthus-leaves. The young Emidius, Bishop
and patron of Ascoli, seems to interrupt the Archangel in order to
recommend to him the turretted city he holds in his hands. Far off, on
the terrace of the archway, one man reads a paper to another. On some
narrow palace-steps, truly a Venetian little staircase, a gentleman of
the city and two monks hold a conversation. And all this takes a new
animation from the childlike action of a little girl whom that
conversation does not amuse, but who perceives something to be taking
place in the street, and thrusts a curious head, in a cap, round the
staircase balustrade, to look below. How rare, in Italian art, is such a
child. Venice here has a heart for something simple, something serious
as well as slight, and something other than adult and condescending. The
glorious Venetian master has this heart in common with the German and
the Fleming, and with that divine Dutchman whose picture in the National
Gallery, “Christ blessing Children,” was taken for a Rembrandt,
and—whatever technical cause may have altered the attribution—was in
spirit worthy of that name of names.
[Illustration:
_D. Anderson_