It is not necessary to follow Colleoni"s fortunes in the Regno, at Aquila, Ancona, and Bologna. He continued in the service of Caldora, who was now General of the Church, and had his _condotta_ gradually increased. Meanwhile his cousins, the murderers of his father, began to dread his rising power, and determined, if possible, to ruin him. He was not a man to be easily a.s.sa.s.sinated; so they sent a hired ruffian to Caldora"s camp to say that Bartolommeo had taken his name by fraud, and that he was himself the real son of Puho Colleoni. Bartolommeo defied the liar to a duel; and this would have taken place before the army, had not two witnesses appeared who knew the fathers of both Colleoni and the _bravo_, and who gave such evidence that the captains of the army were enabled to ascertain the truth. The impostor was stripped and drummed out of the camp.
At the conclusion of a peace between the Pope and the Bolognese, Bartolommeo found himself without occupation. He now offered himself to the Venetians, and began to fight again under the great Carmagnola against Filippo Visconti. His engagement allowed him forty men, which, after the judicial murder of Carmagnola at Venice in 1432, were increased to eighty. Erasmo da Narni, better known as Gattamelata, was now his general-in-chief--a man who had risen from the lowest fortunes to one of the most splendid military positions in Italy. Colleoni spent the next years of his life, until 1443, in Lombardy, manoeuvring against Il Piccinino, and gradually rising in the Venetian service, until his condotta reached the number of eight hundred men. Upon Gattamelata"s death at Padua in 1440, Colleoni became the most important of the generals who had fought with Caldora in the March. The lordships of Romano in the Bergamasque, and of Covo and Antegnate in the Cremonese, had been a.s.signed to him; and he was in a position to make independent engagements with princes. What distinguished him as a general was a combination of caution with audacity. He united the brilliant system of his master Braccio with the more prudent tactics of the Sforzeschi; and thus, though he often surprised his foes by daring stratagems and vigorous a.s.saults, he rarely met with any serious check.
He was a captain who could be relied upon for boldly seizing an advantage, no less than for using a success with discretion. Moreover he had acquired an almost unique reputation for honesty in dealing with his masters, and for justice combined with humane indulgence to his men.
His company was popular, and he could always bring capital troops into the field.
In the year 1443, Colleoni quitted the Venetian service on account of a quarrel with Gherardo Dandolo, the Proveditore of the Republic. He now took a commission from Filippo Maria Visconti, who received him at Milan with great honor, bestowed on him the Castello Adorno at Pavia, and sent him into the March of Ancona upon a military expedition. Of all Italian tyrants, this Visconti was the most difficult to serve. Const.i.tutionally timid, surrounded with a crowd of spies and base informers, shrinking from the sight of men in the recesses of his palace, and controlling the complicated affairs of his duchy by means of correspondents and intelligencers, this last scion of the Milanese despots lived like a spider in an inscrutable network of suspicion and intrigue. His policy was one of endless plot and counterplot. He trusted no man; his servants were paid to act as spies on one another; his body-guard consisted of mutually hostile mercenaries; his captains in the field were watched and thwarted by commissioners appointed to check them at the point of successful ambition or magnificent victory. The historian has a hard task when he tries to fathom the Visconti"s schemes, or to understand his motives. Half the duke"s time seems to have been spent in unravelling the webs that he had woven, in undoing his own work, and weakening the hands of his chosen ministers. Conscious that his power was artificial, that the least breath might blow him back into the nothingness from which he had arisen on the wrecks of his father"s tyranny, he dreaded the personal eminence of his generals above all things. His chief object was to establish a system of checks, by means of which no one whom he employed should at any moment be great enough to threaten him. The most formidable of these military adventurers, Francesco Sforza, had been secured by marriage with Bianca Maria Visconti, his master"s only daughter, in 1441; but the duke did not even trust his son-in-law. The last six years of his life were spent in scheming to deprive Sforza of his lordships; and the war in the March, on which he employed Colleoni, had the object of ruining the princ.i.p.ality acquired by this daring captain from Pope Eugenius IV. in 1443.
Colleoni was by no means deficient in those foxlike qualities which were necessary to save the lion from the toils spread for him by Italian intriguers. He had already shown that he knew how to push his own interests, by changing sides and taking service with the highest bidder, as occasion prompted. Nor, though his character for probity and loyalty stood exceptionally high among the men of his profession, was he the slave to any questionable claims of honor or of duty. In that age of confused politics and extinguished patriotism, there was not indeed much scope for scrupulous honesty. But Filippo Maria Visconti proved more than a match for him in craft. While Colleoni was engaged in pacifying the revolted population of Bologna, the duke yielded to the suggestion of his parasites at Milan, who whispered that the general was becoming dangerously powerful. He recalled him, and threw him without trial into the dungeons of the Forni at Monza. Here Colleoni remained a prisoner more than a year, until the duke"s death, in 1447, when he made his escape, and profited by the disturbance of the duchy to reacquire his lordships in the Bergamasque territory. The true motive for his imprisonment remains still buried in obscure conjecture. Probably it was not even known to the Visconti, who acted on this, as on so many other occasions, by a mere spasm of suspicious jealousy, for which he could have given no account.
From the year 1447 to the year 1455, it is difficult to follow Colleoni"s movements, or to trace his policy. First, we find him employed by the Milanese Republic, during its brief s.p.a.ce of independence; then he is engaged by the Venetians, with a commission for fifteen hundred horse; next, he is in the service of Francesco Sforza; once more in that of the Venetians, and yet again in that of the Duke of Milan. His biographer relates with pride that, during this period, he was three times successful against French troops in Piedmont and Lombardy. It appears that he made short engagements, and changed his paymasters according to convenience. But all this time he rose in personal importance, acquired fresh lordships in the Bergamasque, and acc.u.mulated wealth. He reached the highest point of his prosperity in 1455, when the Republic of St. Mark elected him general-in-chief of their armies, with the fullest powers, and with a stipend of one hundred thousand florins. For nearly twenty-one years, until the day of his death, in 1475, Colleoni held this honorable and lucrative office. In his will he charged the Signory of Venice that they should never again commit into the hands of a single captain such unlimited control over their military resources. It was indeed no slight tribute to Colleoni"s reputation for integrity that the jealous republic, which had signified its sense of Carmagnola"s untrustworthiness by capital punishment, should have left him so long in the undisturbed disposal of their army.
The standard and the baton of St. Mark were conveyed to Colleoni by two amba.s.sadors, and presented to him at Brescia on June 24, 1455. Three years later he made a triumphal entry into Venice, and received the same ensigns of military authority from the hands of the new doge, Pasquale Malipiero. On this occasion his staff consisted of some two hundred officers, splendidly armed, and followed by a train of serving-men.
n.o.blemen from Bergamo, Brescia, and other cities of the Venetian territory, swelled the cortege. When they embarked on the lagoons, they found the water covered with boats and gondolas, bearing the population of Venice in gala attire to greet the ill.u.s.trious guest with instruments of music. Three great galleys of the republic, called bucentaurs, issued from the crowd of smaller craft. On the first was the doge in his state robes, attended by the government in office, or the Signoria of St.
Mark. On the second were members of the senate and minor magistrates.
The third carried the amba.s.sadors of foreign powers. Colleoni was received into the first state galley, and placed by the side of the doge. The oarsmen soon cleared the s.p.a.ce between the land and Venice, pa.s.sed the small ca.n.a.ls, and swept majestically up the Ca.n.a.lozzo among the plaudits of the crowds a.s.sembled on both sides to cheer their general. Thus they reached the piazzetta, where Colleoni alighted between the two great pillars, and, conducted by the doge in person, walked to the Church of St. Mark. Here, after ma.s.s had been said, and a sermon had been preached, kneeling before the high-altar he received the truncheon from the doge"s hands. The words of his commission ran as follows:
"By authority and decree of this most excellent city of Venice, of us the prince, and of the senate, you are to be commander and captain-general of all our forces and armaments on _terra firma_. Take from our hands this truncheon, with good augury and fortune, as sign and warrant of your power. Be it your care and effort, with dignity and splendor to maintain and to defend the majesty, the loyalty, and the principles of this empire. Neither provoking, nor yet provoked, unless at our command, shall you break into open warfare with our enemies. Free jurisdiction and lordship over each one of our soldiers, except in cases of treason, we hereby commit to you."
After the ceremony of his reception, Colleoni was conducted with no less pomp to his lodgings, and the next ten days were spent in festivities of all sorts.
The commandership-in-chief of the Venetian forces was perhaps the highest military post in Italy. It placed Colleoni on the pinnacle of his profession, and made his camp the favorite school of young soldiers.
Among his pupils or lieutenants we read of Ercole d"Este, the future Duke of Ferrara; Alessandro Sforza, Lord of Pesaro; Boniface, Marquis of Montferrat; Cicco and Pino Ordelaffi, Princes of Forli; Astorre Manfredi, the Lord of Faenza; three Counts of Mirandola; two Princes of Carpi; Deifobo, the Count of Anguillara; Giovanni Antonio Caldora, Lord of Jesi in the March; and many others of less name. Honors came thick upon him. When one of the many ineffectual leagues against the infidel was formed in 1468, during the pontificate of Paul II., he was named captain-general for the crusade. Pius II. designed him for the leader of the expedition he had planned against the impious and savage despot Sigismondo Malatesta. King Rene of Anjou, by special patent, authorized him to bear his name and arms, and made him a member of his family. The Duke of Burgundy, by a similar heraldic fiction, conferred upon him his name and armorial bearings. This will explain why Colleoni is often styled "di Andegavia e Borgogna." In the case of Rene, the honor was but a barren show. But the patent of Charles the Bold had more significance.
In 1473 he entertained the project of employing the great Italian general against his Swiss foes; nor does it seem reasonable to reject a statement made by Colleoni"s biographer, to the effect that a secret compact had been drawn up between him and the Duke of Burgundy, for the conquest and part.i.tion of the Duchy of Milan. The Venetians, in whose service Colleoni still remained, when they became aware of this project, met it with peaceful but irresistible opposition.
Colleoni had been engaged continually since his earliest boyhood in the trade of war. It was not therefore possible that he should have gained a great degree of literary culture. Yet the fashion of the times made it necessary that a man in his position should seek the society of scholars. Accordingly his court and camp were crowded with students, in whose wordy disputations he is said to have delighted. It will be remembered that his contemporaries, Alfonso the Magnanimous, Francesco Sforza, Federigo of Urbino, and Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, piqued themselves at least as much upon their patronage of letters as upon their prowess in the field.
Colleoni"s court, like that of Urbino, was a model of manners. As became a soldier, he was temperate in food and moderate in slumber. It was recorded of him that he had never sat more than one hour at meat in his own house, and that he never overslept the sunrise. After dinner he would converse with his friends, using commonly his native dialect of Bergamo, and entertaining the company now with stories of adventure, and now with pithy sayings. In another essential point he resembled his ill.u.s.trious contemporary, the Duke of Urbino; for he was sincerely pious in an age which, however it preserved the decencies of ceremonial religion, was profoundly corrupt at heart. His princ.i.p.al lordships in the Bergamasque territory owed to his munificence their fairest churches and charitable inst.i.tutions. At Martinengo, for example, he rebuilt and re-endowed two monasteries, the one dedicated to St. Chiara, the other to St. Francis. In Bergamo itself he founded an establishment named "La Pieta," for the good purpose of dowering and marrying poor girls. This house he endowed with a yearly income of three thousand ducats. The sulphur baths of Trescorio, at some distance from the city, were improved and opened to poor patients by a hospital which he provided. At Rumano he raised a church to St. Peter, and erected buildings of public utility, which on his death he bequeathed to the society of the Misericordia in that town. All the places of his jurisdiction owed to him such benefits as good water, new walls, and irrigation-works. In addition to these munificent foundations must be mentioned the Basella, or Monastery of Dominican friars, which he established not far from Bergamo, upon the river Serio, in memory of his beloved daughter Medea.
Last, not least, was the Chapel of St. John the Baptist, attached to the Church of S. Maria Maggiore, which he endowed with fitting maintenance for two priests and deacons.
The one defect acknowledged by his biographer was his partiality for women. Early in life he married Tisbe, of the n.o.ble house of the Brescian Martinenghi, who bore him one daughter, Caterina, wedded to Gasparre Martinengo. Two illegitimate daughters, Ursina and Isotta, were recognized and treated by him as legitimate. The first he gave in marriage to Gherardo Martinengo, and the second to Jacopo of the same family. Two other natural children, Doratina and Ricardona, were mentioned in his will: he left them four thousand ducats apiece for dowry. Medea, the child of his old age (for she was born to him when he was sixty), died before her father, and was buried, as we have seen, in the Chapel of Basella.
Throughout his life he was distinguished for great physical strength and agility. When he first joined the troop of Braccio, he could race, with his corselet on, against the swiftest runner of the army; and when he was stripped, few horses could beat him in speed. Far on into old age he was in the habit of taking long walks every morning for the sake of exercise, and delighted in feats of arms and jousting-matches. "He was tall, straight, and full of flesh, well-proportioned, and excellently made in all his limbs. His complexion inclined somewhat to brown, but was colored with sanguine and lively carnation. His eyes were black; in look and sharpness of light they were vivid, piercing, and terrible. The outlines of his nose and all his countenance expressed a certain manly n.o.bleness, combined with goodness and prudence." Such is the portrait drawn of Colleoni by his biographer and it well accords with the famous bronze statue of the general at Venice.
Colleoni lived with a magnificence that suited his rank. His favorite place of abode was Malpaga, a castle built by him at the distance of about an hour"s drive from Bergamo. The place is worth a visit, though its courts and gates and galleries have now been turned into a monster farm, and the southern rooms, where Colleoni entertained his guests, are given over to the silkworms. Half a dozen families, employed upon a vast estate of the Martinengo family, occupy the still substantial house and stables. The moat is planted with mulberry-trees; the upper rooms are used as granaries for golden maize; cows, pigs, and horses litter in the s.p.a.cious yard. Yet the walls of the inner court and of the ancient state-rooms are brilliant with frescos, executed by some good Venetian hand, which represent the chief events of Colleoni"s life--his battles, his reception by the Signory of Venice, his tournaments and hawking-parties, and the great series of entertainments with which he welcomed Christiern of Denmark. This king had made his pilgrimage to Rome, and was returning westward, when the fame of Colleoni and his princely state at Malpaga induced him to turn aside and spend some days as the general"s guest. In order to do him honor, Colleoni left his castle at the king"s disposal and established himself with all his staff and servants in a camp at some distance from Malpaga. The camp was duly furnished with tents and trenches, stockades, artillery, and all the other furniture of war. On the king"s approach, Colleoni issued with trumpets blowing and banners flying to greet his guest, gratifying him thus with a spectacle of the pomp and circ.u.mstance of war as carried on in Italy. The visit was further enlivened by sham fights, feats of arms, and trials of strength. When it ended, Colleoni presented the king with one of his own suits of armor, and gave to each of his servants a complete livery of red and white, his colors. Among the frescos at Malpaga none are more interesting, and none, thanks to the silkworms rather than to any other cause, are fortunately in a better state of preservation, than those which represent this episode in the history of the castle.
Colleoni died in the year 1475, at the age of seventy-five. Since he left no male representative, he const.i.tuted the Republic of St. Mark his heir in chief, after properly providing for his daughters and his numerous foundations. The Venetians received under this testament a sum of one hundred thousand ducats, together with all arrears of pay due to him, and ten thousand ducats owed him by the Duke of Ferrara. It set forth the testator"s intention that this money should be employed in defence of the Christian faith against the Turk. One condition was attached to the bequest. The legatees were to erect a statue to Colleoni on the Piazza of St. Mark. This, however, involved some difficulty; for the proud republic had never accorded a similar honor, nor did they choose to enc.u.mber their splendid square with a monument. They evaded the condition by a.s.signing the Campo in front of the Scuola di S. Marco, where also stands the Church of S. Zanipolo, to the purpose. Here accordingly the finest bronze equestrian statue in Italy, if we except the Marcus Aurelius of the Capitol, was reared upon its marble pedestal by Andrea Verocchio and Alessandro Leopardi.
Colleoni"s liberal expenditure of wealth found its reward in the immortality conferred by art. While the names of Braccio, his master in the art of war, and of Piccinino, his great adversary, are familiar to few but professed students, no one who has visited either Bergamo or Venice can fail to have learned something about the founder of the Chapel of St. John and the original of Leopardi"s bronze. The annals of sculpture a.s.sign to Verocchio, of Florence, the princ.i.p.al share in this statue: but Verocchio died before it was cast; and even granting that he designed the model, its execution must be attributed to his collaborator, the Venetian Leopardi. For my own part, I am loath to admit that the chief credit of this masterpiece belongs to a man whose undisputed work at Florence shows but little of its living spirit and splendor of suggested motion. That the Tuscan science of Verocchio secured conscientious modelling for man and horse may be a.s.sumed; but I am fain to believe that the concentrated fire which animates them both is due in no small measure to the handling of his northern fellow-craftsman.
While immersed in the dreary records of crimes, treasons, cruelties, and base ambitions, which const.i.tute the bulk of fifteenth-century Italian history, it is refreshing to meet with a character so frank and manly, so simply pious and comparatively free from stain, as Colleoni. The only general of his day who can bear comparison with him for purity of public life and decency in conduct was Federigo di Montefeltro. Even here, the comparison redounds to Colleoni"s credit; for he, unlike the Duke of Urbino, rose to eminence by his own exertion in a profession fraught with peril to men of ambition and energy. Federigo started with a princ.i.p.ality sufficient to satisfy his just desires for power. Nothing but his own sense of right and prudence restrained Colleoni upon the path which brought Francesco Sforza to a duchy by dishonorable dealings, and Carmagnola to the scaffold by questionable practice against his masters.
LOMBARD VIGNETTES.
ON THE SUPERGA.
This is the chord of Lombard coloring in May: Lowest in the scale, bright green of varied tints, the meadow-gra.s.ses mingling with willows and acacias, harmonized by air and distance; next, opaque blue--the blue of something between amethyst and lapis-lazuli--that belongs alone to the bas.e.m.e.nts of Italian mountains; higher, the roseate whiteness of ridged snow on Alps or Apennines; highest, the blue of the sky, ascending from pale turquoise to transparent sapphire filled with light.
A mediaeval mystic might have likened this chord to the spiritual world.
For the lowest region is that of natural life, of plant and bird and beast, and unregenerate man. It is the place of faun and nymph and satyr, the plain where wars are fought and cities built and work is done. Thence we climb to purified humanity, the mountains of purgation, the solitude and simplicity of contemplative life not yet made perfect by freedom from the flesh. Higher comes that thin white belt, where are the resting-places of angelic feet, the points whence purged souls take their flight towards infinity. Above all is heaven, the hierarchies ascending row on row to reach the light of G.o.d.
This fancy occurred to me as I climbed the slope of the Superga, gazing over acacia hedges and poplars to the mountains bare in morning light.
The occasional occurrence of bars across this chord--poplars shivering in sun and breeze, stationary cypresses as black as night, and tall campanili with the hot red shafts of glowing brick--adds just enough of composition to the landscape. Without too much straining of the allegory, the mystic might have recognised in these aspiring bars the upward effort of souls rooted in the common life of earth.
The panorama, unrolling as we ascend, is enough to overpower a lover of beauty. There is nothing equal to it for s.p.a.ce and breadth and majesty.
Monte Rosa, the ma.s.ses of Mont Blanc blended with the Grand Paradis, the airy pyramid of Monte Viso, these are the battlements of that vast Alpine rampart in which the vale of Susa opens like a gate. To west and south sweep the Maritime Alps and the Apennines. Beneath glides the infant Po; and where he leads our eyes the plain is only limited by pearly mist.
A BRONZE BUST OF CALIGULA AT TURIN.
The Albertina bronze is one of the most precious portraits of antiquity, not merely because it confirms the testimony of the green basalt bust in the Capitol, but also because it supplies an even more emphatic and impressive ill.u.s.tration to the narrative of Suetonius.
Caligula is here represented as young and singularly beautiful. It is indeed an ideal Roman head, with the powerful square modelling, the crisp short hair, low forehead, and regular firm features proper to the n.o.blest Roman type. The head is thrown backward from the throat; and there is a something of menace or defiance or suffering in the suggestion of brusque movement given to the sinews of the neck. This att.i.tude, together with the tension of the forehead and the fixed expression of pain and strain communicated by the lines of the mouth--strong muscles of the upper lip and abruptly chiselled under lip--in relation to the small eyes, deep set beneath their cavernous and level brows, renders the whole face a monument of spiritual anguish. I remember that the green basalt bust of the Capitol has the same anxious forehead, the same troubled and overburdened eyes; but the agony of this fretful mouth, comparable to nothing but the mouth of Pandolfo Sigismondo Malatesta, and, like that, on the verge of breaking into the spasms of delirium, is quite peculiar to the Albertina bronze. It is just this which the portrait of the Capitol lacks for the completion of Caligula. The man who could be so represented in art had nothing wholly vulgar in him. The brutality of Caracalla, the overblown sensuality of Nero, the effeminacy of Commodus or Heliogabalus are all absent here.
This face idealizes the torture of a morbid soul. It is withal so truly beautiful that it might easily be made the poem of high suffering or n.o.ble pa.s.sion. If the bronze were plastic I see how a great sculptor by but few strokes could convert it into an agonizing Stephen or Sebastian.
As it is, the unimaginable touch of disease, the unrest of madness, made Caligula the genius of insatiable appet.i.te; and his martyrdom was the torment of l.u.s.t and ennui and everlasting agitation. The accident of empire tantalized him with vain hopes of satisfying the Charybdis of his soul"s sick cravings. From point to point he pa.s.sed of empty pleasure and unsatisfying cruelty, forever hungry; until the malady of his spirit, unrestrained by any limitations, and with the right medium for its development, became unique--the tragic type of pathological desire.
What more than all things must have plagued a man with that face was probably the unavoidable meanness of his career. When we study the chapters of Suetonius we are forced to feel that, though the situation and the madness of Caligula were dramatically impressive, his crimes were trivial and small. In spite of the vast scale on which he worked his devilish will, his life presents a total picture of sordid vice, differing only from pothouse dissipation and school-boy cruelty in point of size. And this of a truth is the Nemesis of evil. After a time, mere tyrannous caprice must become commonplace and cloying, tedious to the tyrant and uninteresting to the student of humanity; nor can I believe that Caligula failed to perceive this to his own infinite disgust.
Suetonius a.s.serts that he was hideously ugly. How are we to square this testimony with the witness of the bronze before us? What changed the face, so beautiful and terrible in youth, to ugliness that shrank from sight in manhood? Did the murderers find it blurred in its fine lineaments, furrowed with lines of care, hollowed with the soul"s hunger? Unless a life of vice and madness had succeeded in making Caligula"s face what the faces of some maniacs are--the bloated ruin of what was once a living witness to the soul within--I could fancy that death may have sanctified it with even more beauty than this bust of the self-tormented young man shows. Have we not all seen the anguish of thought-fretted faces smoothed out by the hands of the Deliverer?
FERRARI AT VERCELLI.
It is possible that many visitors to the Cathedral of Como have carried away the memory of stately women with abundant yellow hair and draperies of green and crimson in a picture they connect thereafter with Gaudenzio Ferrari. And when they come to Milan they are probably both impressed and disappointed by a Martyrdom of St. Catherine in the Brera, bearing the same artist"s name. If they wish to understand this painter they must seek him at Varallo, at Saronno, and at Vercelli. In the Church of S. Christoforo, in Vercelli, Gaudenzio Ferrari, at the full height of his powers, showed what he could do to justify Lomazzi"s t.i.tle chosen for him of the eagle. He has indeed the strong wing and the swiftness of the king of birds. And yet the works of few really great painters--and among the really great we place Ferrari--leave upon the mind a more distressing sense of imperfection. Extraordinary fertility of fancy, vehement dramatic pa.s.sion, sincere study of nature, and great command of technical resources are here (as elsewhere in Ferrari"s frescos) neutralized by an incurable defect of the combining and harmonizing faculty so essential to a masterpiece. There is stuff enough of thought and vigor and imagination to make a dozen artists. And yet we turn away disappointed from the crowded, dazzling, stupefying wilderness of forms and faces on these mighty walls.
All that Ferrari derived from actual life--the heads of single figures, the powerful movement of men and women in excited action, the monumental pose of two praying nuns--is admirably rendered. His angels, too, in S.
Cristoforo, as elsewhere, are quite original; not only in their type of beauty, which is terrestrial and peculiar to Ferrari, without a touch of Correggio"s sensuality; but also in the intensity of their emotion, the realisation of their vitality. Those which hover round the Cross in the fresco of the "Crucifixion" are as pa.s.sionate as any angels of the Giottesque masters in a.s.sisi. Those, again, which crowd the Stable of Bethlehem in the "Nativity" yield no point of idyllic charm to Gozzoli"s in the Riccardi Chapel.
The "Crucifixion," and the "a.s.sumption of Madonna" are very tall and narrow compositions, audacious in their attempt to fill almost unmanageable s.p.a.ce with a connected action. Of the two frescos, the "Crucifixion," which has points of strong similarity to the same subject at Varallo, is by far the best. Ferrari never painted anything at once truer to life and n.o.bler in tragic style than the fainting Virgin. Her face expresses the very acme of martyrdom--not exaggerated nor spasmodic, but real and sublime--in the suffering of a stately matron.
In points like this Ferrari cannot be surpa.s.sed. Raphael could scarcely have done better; besides, there is an air of sincerity, a stamp of popular truth in this episode which lies beyond Raphael"s sphere. It reminds us rather of Tintoretto.
After the "Crucifixion," I place the "Adoration of the Magi," full of fine mundane motives and gorgeous costumes; then the "Sposalizio" (whose marriage I am not certain), the only grandly composed picture of the series, and marked by n.o.ble heads; then the "Adoration of the Shepherds," with two lovely angels holding the bambino. The "a.s.sumption of the Magdalen"--for which fresco there is a valuable cartoon in the Albertina Collection at Turin--must have been a fine picture; but it is ruined now. An oil altar-piece, in the choir of the same church, struck me less than the frescos. It represents Madonna and a crowd of saints under an orchard of apple-trees, with cherubs curiously flung about almost at random in the air. The motive of the orchard is prettily conceived and carried out with spirit.
What Ferrari possessed was rapidity of movement, fulness and richness of reality, exuberance of invention, excellent portraiture, dramatic vehemence, and an almost unrivalled sympathy with the swift and pa.s.sionate world of angels. What he lacked was power of composition, simplicity of total effect, harmony in coloring, control over his own luxuriance, the sense of tranquillity. He seems to have sought grandeur in size and mult.i.tude, richness, eclat, contrast. Being the disciple of Leonardo and Raphael, his defects are truly singular. As a composer, the old leaven of Giovenone remained in him; but he felt the dramatic tendencies of a later age, and in occasional episodes he realized them with a force and _furia_ granted to very few of the Italian painters.
LANINI AT VERCELLI.
The Casa Mariano is a palace which belonged to a family of that name.
Like many houses of the sort in Italy, it fell to vile uses, and its hall of audience was turned into a lumber-room. The Operai of Vercelli, I was told, bought the palace a few years ago, restored the n.o.ble hall, and devoted a smaller room to a collection of pictures valuable for students of the early Vercellese style of painting. Of these there is no need to speak. The great hall is the gem of the Casa Mariano. It has a coved roof, with a large, flat, oblong s.p.a.ce in the centre of the ceiling. The whole of this vault and the lunettes beneath were painted by Lanini; so runs the tradition of the fresco-painter"s name; and though much injured by centuries of outrage, and somewhat marred by recent restoration, these frescos form a precious monument of Lombard art. The object of the painter"s design seems to have been the glorification of Music. In the central compartment of the roof is an a.s.sembly of the G.o.ds, obviously borrowed from Raphael"s "Marriage of Cupid and Psyche" in the Farnesina at Rome. The fusion of Roman composition with Lombard execution const.i.tutes the chief charm of this singular work, and makes it, so far as I am aware, unique. Single figures of the G.o.ddesses, and the whole movement of the scene upon Olympus, are transcribed without attempt at concealment. And yet the fresco is not a bare-faced copy. The manner of feeling and of execution is quite different from that of Raphael"s school. The poetry and sentiment are genuinely Lombard. None of Raphael"s pupils could have carried out his design with a delicacy of emotion and a technical skill in coloring so consummate. What, we think, as we gaze upward, would the master have given for such a craftsman? The hardness, coa.r.s.eness, and animal crudity of the Roman school are absent; so also is their vigor.
But where the grace of form and color is so soft and sweet, where the high-bred calm of good company is so sympathetically rendered, where the atmosphere of amorous languor and of melody is so artistically diffused, we cannot miss the powerful modelling and rather vulgar _tours de force_ of Giulio Romano. The scala of tone is silvery golden. There are no hard blues, no coa.r.s.e red flesh-tints, no black shadows. Mellow lights, the morning hues of primrose or of palest amber, pervade the whole society. It is a court of gentle and harmonious souls; and though this style of beauty might cloy, at first sight there is something ravishing in those yellow-haired, white-limbed, blooming deities. No movement of lascivious grace as in Correggio, no perturbation of the senses, as in some of the Venetians, disturbs the rhythm of their music; nor is the pleasure of the flesh, though felt by the painter and communicated to the spectator, an interruption to their divine calm. The white, saffron-haired G.o.ddesses are grouped together like stars seen in the topaz light of evening, like daffodils half smothered in snow-drops, and among them Diana, with the crescent on her forehead, is the fairest.
Her dream-like beauty need fear no comparison with the Diana of the Camera di S. Paolo. Apollo and Bacchus are scarcely less lovely in their bloom of earliest manhood; honey-pale, as Greeks would say; like statues of living electron; realizing Simaetha"s picture of her lover and his friend:
+tois d" en xanthotera men helichrysoio geneias, stethea de stilbonta poly pleon e ty Selana.+
It was thus that the almost childlike spirit of the Milanese painters felt the antique; how differently from their Roman brethren! It was thus that they interpreted the lines of their own poets:
E i tuoi capei piu volte ho somigliati Di Cerere a le paglie secche o bionde Dintorno crespi al tuo capo legati.[F]