As was said on a previous page, few people seem to have been at pains to deal with the life and work of our painter, and while the curators of the Italian museums can tell you little about him, save the approximate dates of his life and death, and a few stories relating to events that would perhaps have occurred if they could, the catalogue of the British Museum has no more than one reference to his name. Tracing the reference to its source, we find a little paper-covered pamphlet, written in the closing years of the seventeenth century and published in Florence some quarter of a century ago. In the British Museum library it is bound with two or three other booklets relating to totally different matters. The pamphlet that concerns us was written by Carlo Dolci's friend and patron, Signor Baldinucci, and has never been translated into English. Baldinucci was one of Dolci's intimates, evidently a good friend and an ardent admirer, a man who praises generously, but is rather reticent about the painter's artistic shortcomings, just as though reticence would avail to keep them hidden from the understanding eye. However, it is no bad thing for us that Signor Baldinucci should have been an enthusiast, because without enthusiasm the bounteous harvest of facts to which we can turn would not have been gathered, and we should have been left in such a state of doubt with regard to the incidents of the painter's life as besets us in dealing with so many of the earlier and more notable men of his art and country.
PLATE III.—THE MAGDALEN
This is an early picture, painted for one of the Florentine religious houses, finished with the utmost care. It has preserved its colour remarkably, and is now to be seen in Florence.
Signor Baldinucci's work describes the artist's pictures in terms of quaint enthusiasm, and happily, too, it does not despise biographical details. This is as well, for, while there is no call for very subtle criticism in the case of Dolci, it is of great interest for us to discover what manner of man he was and how he came to paint so many pretty pictures all in the same key, why he never sought to enlarge the boundaries of his art, or to see "with dilated eye." Our biographer is generous; he gives us facts in plenty, and writes just enough about art to enable us to understand that his knowledge and his enthusiasm stood in inverse ratio to one another. That the author had a following is proved by the fact that the little pamphlet is now out of print, and though the writer sought diligently throughout Florence to procure a copy, he was quite unsuccessful.
Carlo Dolci was born about the year 1616. His father was a highly respected tailor of Florence, Andrea Dolci by name, his mother a daughter of Pietro Marinari, a painter (says Baldinucci) of repute. Carlo's parents seem to have been an exemplary couple, who earned the esteem of all who knew them and raised a family of five children to follow the straight and narrow paths of probity. Carlo is said to have been born on the 25th of May 1616, a day devoted to the honour of St. Zenobius and Santa Maria Maddalena de Pazzi. The elder Dolci died when Carlo was four years old, and his mother was left in straitened circumstances, with which she struggled bravely and not without success. Carlo seems to have been in every respect a model boy; in fact, if his biographer is strictly reliable, he was almost too good for the wicked world he lived in. It would be a relief to hear that he had moments when he was not on his best behaviour, that he robbed orchards, or played truant, or got into one or other of the scrapes that are associated with boyhood; but, alas, he did nothing of the kind. He was not even content to be good, but wanted all his schoolfellows to follow his example, and used to persuade them to tell their beads and say their prayers even when they were out walking.
At the early age of nine Carlo Dolci gave unmistakable signs of possessing an artist's gifts, and was entrusted by his mother to the care of Jacopo Vignali and Matteo Rosselli. He worked very hard under these masters, and was so good that Mr. Barlow of "Sandford and Merton" fame would have been moved to tears of joy had he belonged to the seventeenth century and flourished in the neighbourhood of Florence, while Master Harry Sandford would have hidden a diminished head and confessed that he had found a greater saint than himself. At the age of eleven Carlo Dolci painted his first heads of Christ, one as a child, and the other crowned with thorns; he also painted a full-length figure of St. John. Then he painted a portrait of his mother, who was so pleased with the work that she took it to his master's studio, where, as good luck would have it, Pietro de Medici was in the habit of passing some of his idle hours. This patron of the arts was so pleased with the boy's work that he ordered a portrait of himself and another of a friend, the musician Antonio Landini. He also took the pictures that little Carlo had just painted and showed them to the leaders of society in Florence, presenting the young artist to the duke, who could hardly believe that the work before him had been accomplished by one so young. In order to assure himself, he told the boy to sketch two heads in his presence, only to be so pleased with the work that he rewarded him handsomely for it.
Florence, of course, began to talk of the boy painter, for a prodigy is neither to be despised nor overlooked in any wealthy city. His reputation passed from palace to studio, gathering commissions on its travels, and in a very little time young Dolci had all the work he could do. He painted the portrait of the head of the Bardi family, and that of his nephew John de Bardi. He painted a portrait of Raphael Ximenes. When he was not painting portraits he turned his attention to still life, painting some fruit and flower pictures for his Confessor, Canon Carpanti. His next work was for Lorenzo de Medici, an "Adoration," for which he asked twenty scudi and received forty, and then he painted the subject again on a rather larger canvas for one of the Genitori family, who paid seventy scudi. This picture was sold at the owner's death and realised just four times the sum that had been paid for it, while some pictures of the Evangelists painted by Dolci for one of his Confessors realised nearly twenty times as much as he had received.
It may be suggested without much fear of contradiction, that the success of the painter's earliest work was not the best thing that could have happened to him. If he had been compelled to develop slowly and in the face of adverse circumstance, it is more likely that Carlo Dolci would have given the world work of more lasting merit, but circumstance forced him to paint for patrons at a time when he should have been studying for himself. The style and method of his labours were settled for him, his development was limited and circumscribed; with his native gifts he might have travelled far had he not been hampered by these early successes.
PLATE IV.—THE ETERNAL FATHER