03252cam a22003373u 4500 77937 UtSlPG 20260610134815.0 m cr n 260607r20261903utu|||||o|||||||||||||| d 12031967 UtSlPG en iso639-1 N Meynell, Alice, 1847-1922 Children of the old masters (Italian school) Salt Lake City, UT : Project Gutenberg, 2026 1 online resource : multiple file formats text txt rdacontent computer c rdamedia online resource cr rdacarrier Release date is 2026-02-15 Richard Tonsing and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) "Children of the old masters (Italian school)" by Alice Meynell is an art-historical essay collection written in the early 20th century. It explores how Italian artists—from early Christian and Byzantine inheritances through the Renaissance and beyond—imagined children, chiefly the Christ Child, putti, the young St. John, and, later, secular portraits. Meynell weighs devotion, convention, and style against truthful observation, noting how sculptors and painters alternately idealized, stylized, or freshly observed the child figure. The opening of the book contrasts older image-making as homage with modern mockery, then shows how European art centered for centuries on the Madonna and Child, often treating Christ’s infancy as an eternal mystery. Meynell observes that many Bambini were rendered as corpulent, adult-gestured “fine” children, with rare but luminous exceptions (notably the Della Robbias, occasional Botticellis, and some Titians), and that girl-children scarcely appear. She traces the thread from the lively Catacomb Child and Byzantine mosaics to Cimabue, Duccio, Giotto, and the Nativity seen more as mystery than event. Sculpture leads with naturalism—Giovanni Pisano, Donatello, Jacopo della Quercia, and especially Luca and Andrea della Robbia—while Michelangelo’s infants are judged unchildlike. Among painters, Fra Angelico’s dolls, Masaccio’s and Fra Filippo’s mixed naturalism, Benozzo’s vivid schoolboys, and Botticelli’s devotional-decorative Bambini give way to Ghirlandajo’s putti and his tender “Old Man and Child,” Leonardo’s angelic heads and child studies, Filippino and Lorenzo di Credi’s adolescent angels, and a fashion for infant musicians (Rosso, Fra Bartolommeo). The section then turns to portraits: Bronzino’s named children restore directness, Pontormo slips in scrappy street boys, Mantegna dignifies Gonzaga heirs, and in Venice Titian and followers (Paris Bordone, Tiberio Titi) paint princelings and tender youngsters—leading into Barocci as the text breaks. (This is an automatically generated summary.) Originally published: London: Duckworth and co., 1903 Children in art Art, Italian https://archive.org/details/childrenofoldmas00meyn https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77937 118657 118657