Lorenzo Lotto, too, should perhaps have confined himself to portraiture, if of a fashionable _clientèle_. His pretty _Adoration of the Infant_ might be any mother adoring any infant. Near it—in the Palazzo Martinengo in Brescia—Girolamo Romanino has a frightful fresco in the grand manner, and quite a good portrait of an old gentleman; which suggests that Romanino too should have avoided the classic. There is an altar-piece of his in Padua which, although by no means devoid of beauty, confirms this suggestion, for the Madonna and Child lack character and originality, and are infinitely inferior to the Dutch painting of the robes. The whole composition, indeed, glows and has depth only in its lower and more terrestrial part, including in that term the little girl angel who plays a tambourine below the throne.
Bronzino was another victim to his pious epoch, though he emancipated himself almost as largely as Moroni. His _Madonna_ in the Brera is remarkable for the secular modernity of the Virgin’s companions. On her right is an ultra-realistic old woman; on her left Bernard Shaw looks down with his sarcastic, sceptical gaze.
Even the Netherlanders who had had the fortune to be born free would, after their wander-years in Italy, come back as Italians and paint in the grand manner. Hence the religious and historic Van Dycks which compare so poorly with the portraits, hence Rembrandt’s fat _vrow_ as Madonna, hence the Lenten attempts of Rubens to bant.
AN EXCURSION INTO THE GROTESQUE: WITH A GLANCE AT OLD MAPS AND MODERN FALLACIES
Touching is that quaint theological tree in the cell of sainted Antoninus in San Marco, upon whose red oval leaves grow the biographies of the brethren. They lived, they prayed, they died—that is all. One little leaf suffices to tell the tale. This brother conversed with the greatest humility, and that excelled in silence. A third was found after his death covered with a rough hair shirt (_aspro cilicio_). In the holy shade of this goodly tree sits St. Dominic, separating—as though symbolically—the monks on his right from the nuns on his left.
_Naïveté_ can no further go. And, indeed, if one were to regard the _naïveté_ and forget the sweet simplicity, there is much in the mediæval world that one would relegate to the merely absurd. The masterpieces of Art have been sufficiently described. What a book remains to be written upon its grotesques!