751. MADONNA AND CHILD.
Giovanni Santi (Umbrian: about 1440-1494).
This picture is of peculiar interest because it is by Raphael's father. It does not, however, give a full idea of the extent to which Raphael's talent was hereditary, for Giovanni's easel pictures, such as this, are inferior to his wall pictures. The young Raphael had all the advantages of an atmosphere of artistic culture. Giovanni, like his father before him, was a well-to-do burgher, and kept originally a general retail shop, but he afterwards—under the teaching, it is thought, of Melozzo da Forli—took to painting, and his house, if one may judge from Piero della Francesca's visit in 1467, was a resort of painters. At the brilliant court of Duke Federigo of Urbino, Giovanni moreover acquired a taste for literature, and there is a long rhyming chronicle by him extant in which he describes the Duke's visit to Mantua, and amongst other things praises greatly the works of Mantegna, Melozzo, and Piero della Francesca. But to see how much of Raphael's genius was original, one has only to compare this picture by the father with one (say 744) by the son. Giovanni's female heads are not without a mild dignity of their own; but his works lack the soft grace and winning charm that distinguish his son's.
"Worth study, in spite of what critics say of its crudity. Concede its immaturity, at least, though an immaturity visibly susceptible of a delicate grace, it wins you nevertheless to return again and again, and ponder, by a sincere expression of sorrow, profound, yet resigned, be the cause what it may, among all the causes of sorrow inherent in the ideal of maternity, human or divine. But if you keep in mind, when looking at it, the facts of Raphael's childhood,[180] you will recognise in his father's picture, not the anticipated sorrow of the Mater Dolorosa over the dead son, but the grief of a simple household over the mother herself taken early from it. This may have been the first picture the eyes of the world's great painter of Madonnas rested on; and if he stood diligently before it to copy, and so copying, quite unconsciously, and with no disloyalty to his original, refined, improved, substituted,—substituted himself, in fact, his finer self—he had already struck the persistent note of his career" (Pater: Miscellaneous Studies, p. 32).
752. MADONNA AND CHILD.
Lippo Dalmasii (Bolognese: painted 1376-1410).
See also (p. xx)
A picture by a Bolognese artist, of the Giottesque period, Lippo, son of Dalmasius, called also "Lippo of the Madonna," from the many pictures like this he painted: no Bolognese gentleman's family, we are told, was considered complete without one.