(VENICE)
]
The persons of Titian’s children are those of the other masters—the
Virgin’s Child, the little angels, the little loves, a Ganymede, a faun
or sylvan—with the addition of the portraits of princes already noted,
and the more memorable addition of the little Virgin. To the
humming-bird angel of the Mysteries he gives no other character than
that so familiar to us in all the schools, except only that with him the
frolic movement looks more sincere; needless to say, the tone is more
beautiful than anything yet known in the West. The little angels that
fly below the ascending Madonna of the “Assumption” have Titian’s
delicate darkness of shadows that are winged with secondary lights; if
pearls had the colours of flesh, one would liken them to pearls. To the
beautiful “Ganymede” in our National Gallery, at one time ascribed to
Titian, is now hardly accorded the certainty of a pupil’s name; but we
have possession of a part of an assured Titian child in the human half
of the little satyr or faun who goes in the train of Dionysos. He is a
satyr-urchin of the ways of the woods, an _enfant des rues_ of the
forest and the shore of Naxos; he drags by a string the remnants and
fragments of a sacrifice, as a child going on human feet pulls a toy
horse after him, happy in knowing that it follows, as a backward glance
now and then assures him. He does not laugh, but has a festal gravity as
he skips that is perfectly childish. He is savage, simple, and idle, and
has joined the rout of the progress of the god as a boy in London
follows a show. The Venetian honesty and the Venetian freshness are
manifest in this strolling, trolling figure of Antiquity and the wild
coast. The beauty of the head and the dark eyes is unmarred by any
habitual form of prettiness. The sense of childhood is sincere. If a
child—or but a half-child—is to bear a part in the journeys of the
wine-god, his Silenus, his nymphs, and his leopards, with clashing
cymbals and outcries, this is the childish part—to drag something with a
string. A Florentine would have made the little faun playing an
instrument—he would have had, at the least, to know something of the
cymbals or the triangle. I think that Botticelli’s _amorini_ sporting
with the arms and casque of the sleeping Mars show less feeling for
child’s-play. Titian’s faun is a child of sunshine, as is the beautiful
god leaping from his car, embrowned with summer. Is it indeed of this
picture (we must not doubt it) that Keats was thinking when he made his
Bacchus, journeying eastwards,
“enough white
For Venus’ pearly bite”?
Keats was a great poet of the imagination, and would have been, with
other examples and a riper life, an infinitely great poet of the
imaginative and impassioned intellect. As it is, he is praised as a poet
of the senses, whereas the truth is that his senses were not rich, but
sickly. Of a fruit he loved the “pulp” rather than the “heartening
savour”; of lips, the “pulp” again; of a woman, her “softling” hand and
a “bleat”; of Bacchus his plumpness and the unsunned whiteness of his
flesh.
Titian’s “Garden of the Loves,” or “Hill of Venus,” at the Prado, is a
very beautiful picture, expressing the delight, that Italy learnt from
Antiquity, in an infant court of the maternal Venus. Delight is perhaps
not the word, for the pleasure of the Renascence in these frolic _putti_
does not reach close to the heart; it is rather a pleasure at arm’s
length. The babes of this rich “Garden” are not drawn very
realistically, but they are not falsified, and it is natural to find in
them some likeness to the children of the fishermen of the islands.
It is in his majestic painting of the “Presentation of the Virgin in the
Temple” that Titian has drawn his simplest child. The picture is a great
state-picture, a Venetian reading of the Apocryphal Scriptures, and an
example of the Venetians’ incomparable sense of the dignity of place and
approach. Titian causes us to look upwards at his noble figures, his
noble priest, and at their action, worthy to take place under the sky.
Even in their modern decline and fall, Italians generally keep that
sense of distant approach and room which is the most obvious part of
Titian’s dignities; they still know the value of a staircase, which
English architects, going, as it were, with their elbows close to their
sides, have never had. The Italian takes measures at a suitable
distance, addresses himself, begins spaciously to draw near. But the
master, having this, had also a greater and finer feeling, and his
architecture serves to lift the paternal priest, the humble girl, into
splendid light and sight. The legend that gives him the subject of his
picture had been illustrated by the masters, but not very often or by
them all. We find it in Florence, at Siena, at Padua. It is amongst the
miniatures of the Homilies of James the Monk in the National Library of
Paris. Giotto painted it at Padua, and shows himself embarrassed by the
little girl; Taddeo Gaddi gives her great stature and a small head, an
equivocal figure turning on the stairway to take leave of the world;
Giovanni da Milano has a simpler child; Orcagna counts strictly the
fifteen stairs of the legend; Ghirlandajo shows a young princess of
fifteen in a starred mantle; Sodoma has a child, tenderly relinquished
by her mother; Cima da Conegliano and Carpaccio bring the scene to
Venice. But it is not one of the habitual subjects. Its legend tells (by
means of a “gospel” not accepted as canonical by the Catholic Church,
and, therefore, so accepted by none of the sects) of the dedication of
Mary in her early girlhood to the service of the Temple of Solomon. Some
traditions add the miraculous detail of her infancy, and of her climbing
the steps alone though too young, in the ordinary course of life, to
walk; of the wonder of Joachim and Anne to whom their little daughter
bade farewell, turning to them from the Temple steps. Titian keeps the
tradition of her going up, and he makes her go alone. But she is no
infant—a little girl of seven years or more, whose beautiful hair has
had time to grow. With a charming symbolism, Titian has made the nimbus,
worn by other Saints around their heads, to crown her whole figure, from
head to foot. This is one of the few little girls in Italian art; and
the Venetian has not taken that sweet opportunity with less than the
simplicity of his noble nature; he has not taken occasion for a
trivially beautiful, or, as we say now, a sentimental little maiden. He
has made her nothing but simple in her loveliness; she is erect, a
straightforward child, and with this the whole expression of the lifted
head accords. The action is perhaps somewhat of another time of life,
but all else is purely childlike, and incomparably sweet.
Much like Titian’s is Tintoretto’s “Presentation of the Virgin,” but the
picture, and the figure, are less simple. It is still the most beautiful
of his children, but, though somewhat more “touching,” is less great and
less unconscious than Titian’s. It is wonderful that the two profiles,
both so young and so little spoilt by posture, should yet be lifted up
thus with a difference. Tintoretto’s picture, none the less, is a
splendid one. It has more passion, more movement, and that splendour of
the shadow-view in which Tintoretto surpassed Titian. The shadow-view is
the luminous view. Best of all, the Virgin’s little figure going up the
stair is directly against the sky and the cloud, whereas in Titian’s
picture the child is backed by a pillar.
Amongst Tintoretto’s children are some exquisite Bambini. The new-born
Christ of his “Adoration of the Shepherds” (in the Scuola di San Rocco),
unveiled in a stream of lovely light by a most beautiful Virgin, is a
sincere baby; so is the Child in the strangely splendid group of Madonna
and Child in the Accademia picture. We have seen the Madonna’s Child in
a thousand forms, and on the knees and in the arms of a Mother under a
thousand forms; but Tintoretto’s Virgin and Child are both different,
and fresh, as are Tintoretto’s “Nativity” and his most dramatic and
solemn “Last Supper.” He takes very literally “a new point of view,” by
placing his figures aloft, or his table in perspective, away, in a large
room. True, Parmigiano has a Madonna and Child raised up higher than
Tintoretto’s, looking purely commonplace and conventional—a revelation
without alarm, an insurprising vision; but Tintoretto’s Virgin, against
a visionary sun, sits as though no other had ever been enthroned, and
holds a veritable Child, a beautiful and animated creature, looking
downwards with an infantile impulse, full of liberal grace; the little
head, in a Tintoretto radiance, casting a Tintoretto shadow on the
shoulder and breast. Of this master’s “Massacre of the Innocents” and of
the many repetitions of this subject in the Italian schools, I give
neither reproduction nor description. The painters made this a picture
of women, in strife with the assassins, rather than of children, and the
character of children or their action is hardly in question; an
executioner has them by the leg, or their fragments are on the ground.
But Tintoretto’s picture at San Rocco—he has another at the Frari—is
magnificent. With his characteristic tenderness he has drawn the little
figure of a child that has crawled from the slaughter.
The last of all the examples of Italian children in this picture-book
shall be a peaceful and emblematic _puttino_. It represents Paolo
Veronese, “a noble Venetian,” but no equal to Tintoretto. The child has
the Venetian sincerity; he is really burdened by his sheaf, and even
anxious about the carriage, and is in his own rich person a sign of
abundance.
Italy is said to have much sweetened and softened the children of the
German, Flemish, and Dutch schools by her amiable example. She civilized
the nations of children, fed them high, put an end to all crying and
frowardness, sleeked them, and proclaimed a holiday in the nurseries of
art. It may be so; but after this mission, she might have brought home a
lesson, to make her own sweet humour more valuable. And one master of
masters, Rembrandt, had nothing to learn from “_le clair génie latin_.”
Velazquez studied Titian and Tintoretto; Reynolds studied
Michelangiolo—where did he find the “Strawberry Girl”? Not in such a
nursery as the Sistine Chapel.
If these pages are varied—in all their delight in the children of the
arts—by some disparagement of a certain number of _putti_ who turn out
their feet in a manner that seems but a poor improvement on the ways of
Nature, no descendant exists to resent the criticism, for those children
never grew up. But the little boys of the Della Robbias, of Giovanni
Bellini, of Tintoretto, mortals, ideally sweet, have left their seed in
“sub-celestial” Italy, and the angels of Botticelli never died.
[Illustration: Printer’s device of the Chiswick Press: an oval emblem
featuring a lion standing above a coiled serpent, with the imprint
Chiswick Press: Charles Whittingham and Co., Took’s Court, Chancery
Lane, London.]