To Borgognone is a.s.signed the painting of the roof in nave and choir--exceeding rich, varied, and withal in sympathy with stately Gothic style. Borgognone again is said to have designed the saints and martyrs worked in _tarsia_ for the choir-stalls. His frescoes are in some parts well preserved, as in the lovely little Madonna at the end of the south chapel, while the great fresco above the window in the south transept has an historical value that renders it interesting in spite of partial decay. Borgognone"s oil pictures throughout the church prove, if such proof were needed after inspection of the altar-piece in our National Gallery, that he was one of the most powerful and original painters of Italy, blending the repose of the earlier masters and their consummate workmanship with a profound sensibility to the finest shades of feeling and the rarest forms of natural beauty. He selected an exquisite type of face for his young men and women; on his old men he bestowed singular gravity and dignity. His saints are a society of strong, pure, restful, earnest souls, in whom the pa.s.sion of deepest emotion is transfigured by habitual calm. The brown and golden harmonies he loved, are gained without sacrifice of l.u.s.tre: there is a self-restraint in his colouring which corresponds to the reserve of his emotion; and though a regret sometimes rises in our mind that he should have modelled the light and shade upon his faces with a brusque, unpleasing hardness, their pallor dwells within our memory as something delicately sought if not consummately attained. In a word, Borgognone was a true Lombard of the best time. The very imperfection of his flesh-painting repeats in colour what the greatest Lombard sculptors sought in stone--a sharpness of relief that pa.s.ses over into angularity. This brusqueness was the counterpoise to tenderness of feeling and intensity of fancy in these northern artists. Of all Borgognone"s pictures in the Certosa I should select the altar-piece of S. Siro with S. Lawrence and S.
Stephen and two Fathers of the Church, for its fusion of this master"s qualities.
The Certosa is a wilderness of lovely workmanship. From Borgognone"s majesty we pa.s.s into the quiet region of Luini"s Christian grace, or mark the influence of Lionardo on that rare a.s.sumption of Madonna by his pupil, Andrea Solari. Like everything touched by the Lionardesque spirit, this great picture was left unfinished: yet Northern Italy has nothing finer to show than the landscape, outspread in its immeasurable purity of calm, behind the grouped Apostles and the ascendant Mother of Heaven. The feeling of that happy region between the Alps and Lombardy, where there are many waters--_et tacitos sine labe laous sine murmure rivos_--and where the last spurs of the mountains sink in undulations to the plain, has pa.s.sed into this azure vista, just as all Umbria is suggested in a twilight background of young Raphael or Perugino.
The portraits of the Dukes of Milan and their families carry us into a very different realm of feeling. Medallions above the doors of sacristy and chancel, stately figures reared aloft beneath gigantic canopies, men and women slumbering with folded hands upon their marble biers--we read in all those sculptured forms a strange record of human restlessness, resolved into the quiet of the tomb. The iniquities of Gian Galeazzo Visconti, _il gran Biscione_, the blood-thirst of Gian Maria, the dark designs of Filippo and his secret vices, Francesco Sforza"s treason, Galeazzo Maria"s vanities and l.u.s.ts; their tyrants" dread of thunder and the knife; their awful deaths by pestilence and the a.s.sa.s.sin"s poignard; their selfishness, oppression, cruelty and fraud; the murders of their kinsmen; their labyrinthine plots and acts of broken faith;--all is tranquil now, and we can say to each what Bosola found for the d.u.c.h.ess of Malfi ere her execution:--
Much you had of land and rent; Your length in clay"s now competent: A long war disturbed your mind; Here your perfect peace is signed!
Some of these faces are commonplace, with _bourgeois_ cunning written on the heavy features; one is bluff, another stolid, a third bloated, a fourth stately. The sculptors have dealt fairly with all, and not one has the lineaments of utter baseness. To Cristoforo Solari"s statues of Lodovico Sforza and his wife, Beatrice d"Este, the palm of excellence in art and of historical interest must be awarded.
Sculpture has rarely been more dignified and true to life than here.
The woman with her short cl.u.s.tering curls, the man with his strong face, are resting after that long fever which brought woe to Italy, to Europe a new age, and to the boasted minion of Fortune a slow death in the prison palace of Loches. Attired in ducal robes, they lie in state; and the sculptor has carved the lashes on their eyelids, heavy with death"s marmoreal sleep. He at least has pa.s.sed no judgment on their crimes. Let us too bow and leave their memories to the historian"s pen, their spirits to G.o.d"s mercy.
After all wanderings in this Temple of Art, we return to Antonio Amadeo, to his long-haired seraphs playing on the lutes of Paradise, to his angels of the Pa.s.sion with their fluttering robes and arms outspread in agony, to his saints and satyrs mingled on pilasters of the marble doorways, his delicate _Lavabo_ decorations, and his hymns of piety expressed in n.o.ble forms of weeping women and dead Christs. Wherever we may pa.s.s, this master-spirit of the Lombard style enthralls attention. His curious treatment of drapery as though it were made of crumpled paper, and his trick of enhancing relief by sharp angles and attenuated limbs, do not detract from his peculiar charm. That is his way, very different from Donatello"s, of attaining to the maximum of life and lightness in the stubborn vehicle of stone. Nor do all the riches of the choir--those mult.i.tudes of singing angels, those Ascensions and a.s.sumptions, and innumerable basreliefs of gleaming marble moulded into softest wax by mastery of art--distract our eyes from the single round medallion, not larger than a common plate, inscribed by him upon the front of the high altar. Perhaps, if one who loved Amadeo were bidden to point out his masterpiece, he would lead the way at once to this. The s.p.a.ce is small: yet it includes the whole tragedy of the Pa.s.sion. Christ is lying dead among the women on his mother"s lap, and there are pitying angels in the air above. One woman lifts his arm, another makes her breast a pillow for his head. Their agony is hushed, but felt in every limb and feature; and the extremity of suffering is seen in each articulation of the worn and wounded form just taken from the cross.
It would be too painful, were not the harmony of art so rare, the interlacing of those many figures in a simple round so exquisite. The n.o.blest tranquillity and the most pa.s.sionate emotion are here fused in a manner of adorable naturalness.
From the church it is delightful to escape into the cloisters, flooded with sunlight, where the swallows skim, and the brown hawks circle, and the mason bees are at work upon their cells among the carvings.
The arcades of the two cloisters are the final triumph of Lombard terra-cotta. The memory fails before such infinite invention, such facility and felicity of execution. Wreaths of cupids gliding round the arches among grape-bunches and bird-haunted foliage of vine; rows of angels, like rising and setting planets, some smiling and some grave, ascending and descending by the Gothic curves; saints stationary on their pedestals, and faces leaning from the rounds above; crowds of cherubs, and courses of stars, and acanthus leaves in woven lines, and ribands incessantly inscribed with Ave Maria! Then, over all, the rich red light and purple shadows of the brick, than which no substance sympathises more completely with the sky of solid blue above, the broad plain s.p.a.ce of waving summer gra.s.s beneath our feet.
It is now late afternoon, and when evening comes, the train will take us back to Milan. There is yet a little while to rest tired eyes and strained spirits among the willows and the poplars by the monastery wall. Through that grey-green leaf.a.ge, young with early spring, the pinnacles of the Certosa leap like flames into the sky. The rice-fields are under water, far and wide, shining like burnished gold beneath the level light now near to sun-down. Frogs are croaking; those persistent frogs, whom the Muses have ordained to sing for aye, in spite of Bion and all tuneful poets dead. We sit and watch the water-snakes, the busy rats, the hundred creatures swarming in the fat well-watered soil. Nightingales here and there, new-comers, tune their timid April song: but, strangest of all sounds in such a place, my comrade from the Grisons jodels forth an Alpine cowherd"s melody.
_Auf den Alpen droben ist ein herrliches Leben!_
Did the echoes of Gian Galeazzo"s convent ever wake to such a tune as this before?
SAN MAURIZIO
The student of art in Italy, after mastering the characters of different styles and epochs, finds a final satisfaction in the contemplation of buildings designed and decorated by one master, or by groups of artists interpreting the spirit of a single period. Such supreme monuments of the national genius are not very common, and they are therefore the more precious. Giotto"s Chapel at Padua; the Villa Farnesina at Rome, built by Peruzzi and painted in fres...o...b.. Raphael and Sodoma; the Palazzo del Te at Mantua, Giulio Romano"s masterpiece; the Scuola di San Rocco, ill.u.s.trating the Venetian Renaissance at its climax, might be cited among the most splendid of these achievements.
In the church of the Monastero Maggiore at Milan, dedicated to S.
Maurizio, Lombard architecture and fresco-painting may be studied in this rare combination. The monastery itself, one of the oldest in Milan, formed a retreat for cloistered virgins following the rule of S. Benedict. It may have been founded as early as the tenth century; but its church was rebuilt in the first two decades of the sixteenth, between 1503 and 1519, and was immediately afterwards decorated with frescoes by Luini and his pupils. Gian Giacomo Dolcebono, architect and sculptor, called by his fellow-craftsmen _magistro di taliare pietre_, gave the design, at once simple and harmonious, which was carried out with hardly any deviation from his plan. The church is a long parallelogram, divided into two unequal portions, the first and smaller for the public, the second for the nuns. The walls are pierced with rounded and pilastered windows, ten on each side, four of which belong to the outer and six to the inner section. The dividing wall or septum rises to the point from which the groinings of the roof spring; and round three sides of the whole building, north, east, and south, runs a gallery for the use of the convent. The altars of the inner and outer church are placed against the septum, back to back, with certain differences of structure that need not be described. Simple and severe, S. Maurizio owes its architectural beauty wholly and entirely to purity of line and perfection of proportion. There is a prevailing spirit of repose, a sense of s.p.a.ce, fair, lightsome, and adapted to serene moods of the meditative fancy in this building, which is singularly at variance with the religious mysticism and imaginative grandeur of a Gothic edifice. The princ.i.p.al beauty of the church, however, is its tone of colour. Every square inch is covered with fresco or rich woodwork, mellowed by time into that harmony of tints which blends the work of greater and lesser artists in one golden hue of brown. Round the arcades of the convent-loggia run delicate arabesques with faces of fair female saints--Catherine, Agnes, Lucy, Agatha,--gem-like or star-like, gazing from their gallery upon the church below. The Luinesque smile is on their lips and in their eyes, quiet, refined, as though the emblems of their martyrdom brought back no thought of pain to break the Paradise of rest in which they dwell.
There are twenty-six in all, a sisterhood of stainless souls, the lilies of Love"s garden planted round Christ"s throne. Soldier saints are mingled with them in still smaller rounds above the windows, chosen to ill.u.s.trate the virtues of an order which renounced the world. To decide whose hand produced these masterpieces of Lombard suavity and grace, or whether more than one, would not be easy. Near the altar we can perhaps trace the style of Bartolommeo Suardi in an Annunciation painted on the spandrils--that heroic style, large and n.o.ble, known to us by the chivalrous S. Martin and the glorified Madonna of the Brera frescoes. It is not impossible that the male saints of the loggia may be also his, though a tenderer touch, a something more nearly Lionardesque in its quietude, must be discerned in Lucy and her sisters. The whole of the altar in this inner church belongs to Luini. Were it not for darkness and decay, we should p.r.o.nounce this series of the Pa.s.sion in nine great compositions, with saints and martyrs and torch-bearing genii, to be one of his most ambitious and successful efforts. As it is, we can but judge in part; the adolescent beauty of Sebastian, the grave compa.s.sion of S.
Rocco, the cla.s.sical perfection of the cupid with lighted tapers, the gracious majesty of women smiling on us sideways from their Lombard eyelids--these remain to haunt our memory, emerging from the shadows of the vault above.
The inner church, as is fitting, excludes all worldly elements. We are in the presence of Christ"s agony, relieved and tempered by the sunlight of those beauteous female faces. All is solemn here, still as the convent, pure as the meditations of a novice. We pa.s.s the septum, and find ourselves in the outer church appropriated to the laity.
Above the high altar the whole wall is covered with Luini"s loveliest work, in excellent light and far from ill preserved. The s.p.a.ce divides into eight compartments. A Pieta, an a.s.sumption, Saints and Founders of the church, group themselves under the influence of Luini"s harmonising colour into one symphonious whole. But the places of distinction are reserved for two great benefactors of the convent, Alessandro de" Bentivogli and his wife, Ippolita Sforza. When the Bentivogli were expelled from Bologna by the Papal forces, Alessandro settled at Milan, where he dwelt, honoured by the Sforzas and allied to them by marriage, till his death in 1532. He was buried in the monastery by the side of his sister Alessandra, a nun of the order.
Luini has painted the ill.u.s.trious exile in his habit as he lived. He is kneeling, as though in ever-during adoration of the altar mystery, attired in a long black senatorial robe trimmed with furs. In his left hand he holds a book; and above his pale, serenely n.o.ble face is a little black berretta. Saints attend him, as though attesting to his act of faith. Opposite kneels Ippolita, his wife, the brilliant queen of fashion, the witty leader of society, to whom Bandello dedicated his Novelle, and whom he praised as both incomparably beautiful and singularly learned. Her queenly form is clothed from head to foot in white brocade, slashed and trimmed with gold lace, and on her forehead is a golden circlet. She has the proud port of a princess, the beauty of a woman past her prime but stately, the indescribable dignity of att.i.tude which no one but Luini could have rendered so majestically sweet. In her hand is a book; and she, like Alessandro, has her saintly sponsors, Agnes and Catherine and S. Scolastica.
Few pictures bring the splendid Milanese Court so vividly before us as these portraits of the Bentivogli: they are, moreover, very precious for the light they throw on what Luini could achieve in the secular style so rarely touched by him. Great, however, as are these frescoes, they are far surpa.s.sed both in value and interest by his paintings in the side chapel of S. Catherine. Here more than anywhere else, more even than at Saronno or Lugano, do we feel the true distinction of Luini--his unrivalled excellence as a colourist, his power over pathos, the refinement of his feeling, and the peculiar beauty of his favourite types. The chapel was decorated at the expense of a Milanese advocate, Frances...o...b..sozzi, who died in 1529. It is he who is kneeling, grey-haired and bareheaded, under the protection of S.
Catherine of Alexandria, intently gazing at Christ unbound from the scourging pillar. On the other side stand S. Lawrence and S. Stephen, pointing to the Christ and looking at us, as though their lips were framed to say: "Behold and see if there be any sorrow like unto his sorrow." Even the soldiers who have done their cruel work, seem softened. They untie the cords tenderly, and support the fainting form, too weak to stand alone. What sadness in the lovely faces of S.
Catherine and Lawrence! What divine anguish in the loosened limbs and bending body of Christ; what piety in the adoring old man! All the moods proper to this supreme tragedy of the faith are touched as in some tenor song with low accompaniment of viols; for it was Luini"s special province to feel profoundly and to express musically. The very depth of the Pa.s.sion is there; and yet there is no discord.
Just in proportion to this unique faculty for yielding a melodious representation of the most intense moments of stationary emotion, was his inability to deal with a dramatic subject. The first episode of S.
Catherine"s execution, when the wheel was broken and the executioners struck by lightning, is painted in this chapel without energy and with a lack of composition that betrays the master"s indifference to his subject. Far different is the second episode when Catherine is about to be beheaded. The executioner has raised his sword to strike. She, robed in brocade of black and gold, so cut as to display the curve of neck and back, while the bosom is covered, leans her head above her praying hands, and waits the blow in sweetest resignation. Two soldiers stand at some distance in a landscape of hill and meadow; and far up are seen the angels carrying her body to its tomb upon Mount Sinai. I cannot find words or summon courage to describe the beauty of this picture; its atmosphere of holy peace, the dignity of its composition, the golden richness of its colouring. The most tragic situation has here again been alchemised by Luini"s magic into a pure idyll, without the loss of power, without the sacrifice of edification.
S. Catherine in this incomparable fresco is a portrait, the history of which so strikingly ill.u.s.trates the relation of the arts to religion on the one hand, and to life on the other, in the age of the Renaissance, that it cannot be omitted. At the end of his fourth Novella, having related the life of the Contessa di Cellant, Bandello says: "And so the poor woman was beheaded; such was the end of her unbridled desires; and he who would fain see her painted to the life, let him go to the Church of the Monistero Maggiore, and there will he behold her portrait." The Contessa di Cellant was the only child of a rich usurer who lived at Casal Monferrato. Her mother was a Greek; and she was a girl of such exquisite beauty, that, in spite of her low origin, she became the wife of the n.o.ble Ermes Visconti in her sixteenth year. He took her to live with him at Milan, where she frequented the house of the Bentivogli, but none other. Her husband told Bandello that he knew her temper better than to let her visit with the freedom of the Milanese ladies. Upon his death, while she was little more than twenty, she retired to Casale and led a gay life among many lovers. One of these, the Count of Cellant in the Val d"Aosta, became her second husband, conquered by her extraordinary loveliness. They could not, however, agree together. She left him, and established herself at Pavia. Rich with her father"s wealth and still of most seductive beauty, she now abandoned herself to a life of profligacy. Three among her lovers must be named: Ardizzino Valperga, Count of Masino; Roberto Sanseverino, of the princely Naples family; and Don Pietro di Cardona, a Sicilian. With each of the two first she quarrelled, and separately besought each to murder the other. They were friends and frustrated her plans by communicating them to one another. The third loved her with the insane pa.s.sion of a very young man. What she desired, he promised to do blindly; and she bade him murder his two predecessors in her favour. At this time she was living at Milan, where the Duke of Bourbon was acting as viceroy for the Emperor. Don Pietro took twenty-five armed men of his household, and waylaid the Count of Masino, as he was returning with his brother and eight or nine servants, late one night from supper. Both the brothers and the greater part of their suite were killed: but Don Pietro was caught. He revealed the atrocity of his mistress; and she was sent to prison. Incapable of proving her innocence, and prevented from escaping, in spite of 15,000 golden crowns with which she hoped to bribe her jailors, she was finally beheaded. Thus did a vulgar and infamous Messalina, distinguished only by rare beauty, furnish Luini with a S. Catherine for this masterpiece of pious art! The thing seems scarcely credible. Yet Bandello lived in Milan while the Church of S. Maurizio was being painted; nor does he show the slightest sign of disgust at the discord between the Contessa"s life and her artistic presentation in the person of a royal martyr.
A HUMANIST"S MONUMENT
In the Sculpture Gallery of the Brera is preserved a fair white marble tomb, carved by that excellent Lombard sculptor, Agostino Busti. The epitaph runs as follows:--
En Virtutem Mortis nesciam.
Vivet Lancinus Curtius Saecula per omnia Quascunque l.u.s.trans oras, Tantum possunt Camoenae.
"Look here on Virtue that knows nought of Death! Lancinus Curtius shall live through all the centuries, and visit every sh.o.r.e of earth.
Such power have the Muses." The timeworn poet reclines, as though sleeping or resting, ready to be waked; his head is covered with flowing hair, and crowned with laurel; it leans upon his left hand. On either side of his couch stand cupids or genii with torches turned to earth. Above is a group of the three Graces, flanked by winged Pegasi.
Higher up are throned two Victories with palms, and at the top a naked Fame. We need not ask who was Lancinus Curtius. He is forgotten, and his virtue has not saved him from oblivion; though he strove in his lifetime, _pro virili parte_, for the palm that Busti carved upon his grave. Yet his monument teaches in short compa.s.s a deep lesson; and his epitaph sums up the dream which lured the men of Italy in the Renaissance to their doom. We see before us sculptured in this marble the ideal of the humanistic poet-scholar"s life: Love, Grace, the Muse, and Nakedness, and Glory. There is not a single intrusive thought derived from Christianity. The end for which the man lived was Pagan. His hope was earthly fame. Yet his name survives, if this indeed be a survival, not in those winged verses which were to carry him abroad across the earth, but in the marble of a cunning craftsman, scanned now and then by a wandering scholar"s eye in the half-darkness of a vault.
THE MONUMENT OF GASTON DE FOIX IN THE BRERA
The hero of Ravenna lies stretched upon his back in the hollow of a bier covered with laced drapery; and his head rests on richly ornamented cushions. These decorative accessories, together with the minute work of his scabbard, wrought in the fanciful mannerism of the _cinquecento_, serve to enhance the statuesque simplicity of the young soldier"s effigy. The contrast between so much of richness in the merely subordinate details, and this sublime severity of treatment in the person of the hero, is truly and touchingly dramatic. There is a smile as of content in death, upon his face; and the features are exceedingly beautiful--with the beauty of a boy, almost of a woman.
The heavy hair is cut straight above the forehead and straight over the shoulders, falling in ma.s.sive cl.u.s.ters. A delicately sculptured laurel branch is woven into a victor"s crown, and laid lightly on the tresses it scarcely seems to clasp. So fragile is this wreath that it does not break the pure outline of the boy-conqueror"s head. The armour is quite plain. So is the surcoat. Upon the swelling bust, that seems fit harbour for a hero"s heart, there lies the collar of an order composed of c.o.c.kle-sh.e.l.ls; and this is all the ornament given to the figure. The hands are clasped across a sword laid flat upon the breast, and placed between the legs. Upon the chin is a little tuft of hair, parted, and curling either way; for the victor of Ravenna, like the Hermes of Homer, was [Greek: proton hypenetes], "a youth of princely blood, whose beard hath just begun to grow, for whom the season of bloom is in its prime of grace." The whole statue is the idealisation of _virtu_--that quality so highly prized by the Italians and the ancients, so well fitted for commemoration in the arts. It is the apotheosis of human life resolved into undying memory because of one great deed. It is the supreme portrait in modern times of a young hero, chiselled by artists belonging to a race no longer heroic, but capable of comprehending and expressing the aesthetic charm of heroism. Standing before it, we may say of Gaston what Arrian wrote to Hadrian of Achilles:--"That he was a hero, if hero ever lived, I cannot doubt; for his birth and blood were n.o.ble, and he was beautiful, and his spirit was mighty, and he pa.s.sed in youth"s prime away from men." Italian sculpture, under the condition of the _cinquecento_, had indeed no more congenial theme than this of bravery and beauty, youth and fame, immortal honour and untimely death; nor could any sculptor of death have poetised the theme more thoroughly than Agostino Busti, whose simple instinct, unlike that of Michelangelo, led him to subordinate his own imagination to the pathos of reality.
SARONNO
The church of Saronno is a pretty building with a Bramantesque cupola, standing among meadows at some distance from the little town. It is the object of a special cult, which draws pilgrims from the neighbouring country-side; but the concourse is not large enough to load the sanctuary with unnecessary wealth. Everything is very quiet in the holy place, and the offerings of the pious seem to have been only just enough to keep the building and its treasures of art in repair. The church consists of a nave, a central cupola, a vestibule leading to the choir, the choir itself, and a small tribune behind the choir. No other single building in North Italy can boast so much that is first-rate of the work of Luini and Gandenzio Ferrari.
The cupola is raised on a sort of drum composed of twelve pieces, perforated with round windows and supported on four ma.s.sive piers. On the level of the eye are frescoes by Luini of S. Rocco, S. Sebastian, S. Christopher, and S. Antony--by no means in his best style, and inferior to all his other paintings in this church. The Sebastian, for example, shows an effort to vary the traditional treatment of this saint. He is tied in a sprawling att.i.tude to a tree; and little of Luini"s special pathos or sense of beauty--the melody of idyllic grace made spiritual--appears in him. These four saints are on the piers.
Above are frescoes from the early Bible history by Lanini, painted in continuation of Ferrari"s medallions from the story of Adam expelled from Paradise, which fill the s.p.a.ce beneath the cupola, leading the eye upward to Ferrari"s masterpiece.
The dome itself is crowded with a host of angels singing and playing upon instruments of music. At each of the twelve angles of the drum stands a coryphaeus of this celestial choir, full length, with waving drapery. Higher up, the golden-haired, broad-winged, divine creatures are ma.s.sed together, filling every square inch of the vault with colour. Yet there is no confusion. The simplicity of the selected motive and the necessities of the place acted like a check on Ferrari, who, in spite of his dramatic impulse, could not tell a story coherently or fill a canvas with harmonised variety. There is no trace of his violence here. Though the motion of music runs through the whole mult.i.tude like a breeze, though the joy expressed is a real _tripudio celeste_, not one of all these angels flings his arms abroad or makes a movement that disturbs the rhythm. We feel that they are keeping time and resting quietly, each in his appointed seat, as though the sphere was circling with them round the throne of G.o.d, who is their centre and their source of gladness. Unlike Correggio and his imitators, Ferrari has introduced no clouds, and has in no case made the legs of his angels prominent. It is a ma.s.s of n.o.ble faces and voluminously robed figures, emerging each above the other like flowers in a vase. Bach too has specific character, while all are robust and full of life, intent upon the service set them. Their instruments of music are all the lutes and viols, flutes, cymbals, drums, fifes, citherns, organs, and harps that Ferrari"s day could show. The scale of colour, as usual with Ferrari, is a little heavy; nor are the tints satisfactorily harmonised. But the vigour and invention of the whole work would atone for minor defects of far greater consequence.
It is natural, beneath this dome, to turn aside and think one moment of Correggio at Parma. Before the _macchinisti_ of the seventeenth century had vulgarised the motive, Correggio"s bold attempt to paint heaven in flight from earth--earth left behind in the persons of the Apostles standing round the empty tomb, heaven soaring upward with a spiral vortex into the abyss of light above--had an originality which set at nought all criticism. There is such ecstasy of jubilation, such rapturous rapidity of flight, that we who strain our eyes from below, feel we are in the darkness of the grave which Mary left. A kind of controlling rhythm for the composition is gained by placing Gabriel, Madonna, and Christ at three points in the swirl of angels. Nevertheless, composition--the presiding all-controlling intellect--is just what makes itself felt by absence; and Correggio"s special qualities of light and colour have now so far vanished from the cupola of the Duomo that the, constructive poverty is not disguised. Here if anywhere in painting, we may apply Goethe"s words--_Gefuhl ist Alles._
If then we return to Ferrari"s angels at Saronno, we find that the painter of Varallo chose a safer though a far more modest theme. Nor did he expose himself to that most cruel of all degradations which the ethereal genius of Correggio has suffered from incompetent imitators.
To daub a tawdry and superficial reproduction of those Parmese frescoes, to fill the cupolas of Italy with veritable _guazzetti di rane_, was comparatively easy; and between our intelligence and what remains of that stupendous masterpiece of boldness, crowd a thousand memories of such inept.i.tude. On the other hand, nothing but solid work and conscientious inspiration could enable any workman, however able, to follow Ferrari in the path struck out by him at Saronno. His cupola has had no imitator; and its only rival is the n.o.ble pendant painted at Varallo by his own hand, of angels in adoring anguish round the Cross.
In the ante-choir of the sanctuary are Luini"s priceless frescoes of the "Marriage of the Virgin," and the "Dispute with the Doctors."[11]
Their execution is flawless, and they are perfectly preserved. If criticism before such admirable examples of so excellent a master be permissible, it may be questioned whether the figures are not too crowded, whether the groups are sufficiently varied and connected by rhythmic lines. Yet the concords of yellow and orange with blue in the "Sposalizio," and the blendings of dull violet and red in the "Disputa," make up for much of stiffness. Here, as in the Chapel of S. Catherine at Milan, we feel that Luini was the greatest colourist among _frescanti._ In the "Sposalizio" the female heads are singularly n.o.ble and idyllically graceful. Some of the young men too have Luini"s special grace and abundance of golden hair. In the "Disputa" the gravity and dignity of old men are above all things striking.
Pa.s.sing into the choir, we find on either hand the "Adoration of the Magi" and the "Purification of the Virgin," two of Luini"s divinest frescoes. Above them in lunettes are four Evangelists and four Latin Fathers, with four Sibyls. Time and neglect have done no damage here: and here, again, perforce we notice perfect mastery of colour in fresco. The blues detach themselves too much, perhaps, from the rest of the colouring; and that is all a devil"s advocate could say. It is possible that the absence of blue makes the S. Catherine frescoes in the Monastero Maggiore at Milan surpa.s.s all other works of Luini. But nowhere else has he shown more beauty and variety in detail than here. The group of women led by Joseph, the shepherd carrying the lamb upon his shoulder, the girl with a basket of white doves, the child with an apple on the altar-steps, the lovely youth in the foreground heedless of the scene; all these are idyllic incidents treated with the purest, the serenest, the most spontaneous, the truest, most instinctive sense of beauty. The landscape includes a view of Saronno, and an episodical picture of the "Flight into Egypt"
where a white-robed angel leads the way. All these lovely things are in the "Purification," which is dated _Bernardinus Lovinus pinxit_, MDXXV.
The fresco of the "Magi" is less notable in detail, and in general effect is more spoiled by obtrusive blues. There is, however, one young man of wholly Lionardesque loveliness, whose divine innocence of adolescence, unalloyed by serious thought, unstirred by pa.s.sions, almost forces a comparison with Sodoma. The only painter who approaches Luini in what may be called the Lombard, to distinguish it from the Venetian idyll, is Sodoma; and the work of his which comes nearest to Luini"s masterpieces is the legend of S. Benedict, at Monte Oliveto, near Siena. Yet Sodoma had not all Luini"s innocence or _navete._ If he added something slightly humorous which has an indefinite charm, he lacked that freshness as of "cool, meek-blooded flowers" and boyish voices, which fascinates us in Luini. Sodoma was closer to the earth, and feared not to impregnate what he saw of beauty with the fiercer pa.s.sions of his nature. If Luini had felt pa.s.sion, who shall say? It appears nowhere in his work, where life is toned to a religious joyousness. When Sh.e.l.ley compared the poetry of the Theocritean amourists to the perfume of the tuberose, and that of the earlier Greek poets to "a meadow-gale of June, which mingles the fragrance of all the flowers of the field," he supplied us with critical images which may not unfairly be used to point the distinction between Sodoma at Monte Oliveto and Luini at Saronno.
THE CASTELLO OF FERRARA
Is it possible that the patron saints of cities should mould the temper of the people to their own likeness? S. George, the chivalrous, is champion of Ferrara. His is the marble group above the Cathedral porch, so feudal in its medieval pomp. He and S. Michael are painted in fresco over the south portcullis of the Castle. His l.u.s.trous armour gleams with Giorgionesque brilliancy from Dossi"s masterpiece in the Pinacoteca. That Ferrara, the only place in Italy where chivalry struck any root, should have had S. George for patron, is at any rate significant.
The best preserved relic of princely feudal life in Italy is this Castello of the Este family, with its sombre moat, chained drawbridges, doleful dungeons, and unnumbered tragedies, each one of which may be compared with Parisina"s history. I do not want to dwell on these things now. It is enough to remember the Castello, built of ruddiest brick, time-mellowed with how many centuries of sun and soft sea-air, as it appeared upon the close of one tempestuous day. Just before evening the rain-clouds parted and the sun flamed out across the misty Lombard plain. The Castello burned like a hero"s funeral pyre, and round its high-built turrets swallows circled in the warm blue air. On the moat slept shadows, mixed with flowers of sunset, tossed from pinnacle and gable. Then the sky changed. A roof of thunder-cloud spread overhead with the rapidity of tempest. The dying sun gathered his last strength against it, fretting those steel-blue arches with crimson; and all the fierce light, thrown from vault to vault of cloud, was reflected back as from a shield, and cast in blots and patches on the buildings. The Castle towered up rosy-red and shadowy sombre, enshrined, embosomed in those purple clouds; and momently ran lightning forks like rapiers through the growing ma.s.s.
Everything around, meanwhile, was quiet in the gra.s.s-grown streets.
The only sound was a high, clear boy"s voice chanting an opera tune.
PETRARCH"S TOMB AT ARQUA
The drive from Este along the skirts of the Euganean Hills to Arqua takes one through a country which is tenderly beautiful, because of its contrast between little peaked mountains and the plain. It is not a grand landscape. It lacks all that makes the skirts of Alps and Apennines sublime. Its charm is a certain mystery and repose--an undefined sense of the neighbouring Adriatic, a pervading consciousness of Venice unseen, but felt from far away. From the terraces of Arqua the eye ranges across olive-trees, laurels, and pomegranates on the southern slopes, to the misty level land that melts into the sea, with churches and tall campanili like gigantic galleys setting sail for fairyland over "the foam of perilous seas forlorn." Let a blue-black shadow from a thunder-cloud be cast upon this plain, and let one ray of sunlight strike a solitary bell-tower;--it burns with palest flame of rose against the steely dark, and in its slender shaft and sh.e.l.l-like tint of pink all Venice is foreseen.
The village church of Arqua stands upon one of these terraces, with a full stream of clearest water flowing by. On the little square before the church-door, where the peasants congregate at ma.s.s-time--open to the skies with all their stars and storms, girdled by the hills, and within hearing of the vocal stream--is Petrarch"s sepulchre. Fit resting-place for what remains to earth of such a poet"s clay! It is as though archangels, flying, had carried the marble chest and set it down here on the hillside, to be a sign and sanctuary for after-men. A simple rectilinear coffin, of smooth Verona _mandorlato_, raised on four thick columns, and closed by a heavy cippus-cover. Without emblems, allegories, or lamenting genii, this tomb of the great poet, the great awakener of Europe from mental lethargy, encircled by the hills, beneath the canopy of heaven, is impressive beyond the power of words. Bending here, we feel that Petrarch"s own winged thoughts and fancies, eternal and aerial, "forms more real than living man, nurslings of immortality," have congregated to be the ever-ministering and irremovable attendants on the shrine of one who, while he lived, was purest spirit in a veil of flesh.
ON A MOUNTAIN
Milan is shining in sunset on those purple fields; and a score of cities flash back the last red light, which shows each inequality and undulation of Lombardy outspread four thousand feet beneath. Both ranges, Alps and Apennines, are clear to view; and all the silvery lakes are over-canopied and brought into one picture by flame-litten mists. Monte Rosa lifts her crown of peaks above a belt of clouds into light of living fire. The Mischabelhorner and the Dom rest stationary angel-wings upon the rampart, which at this moment is the wall of heaven. The pyramid of distant Monte Viso burns like solid amethyst far, far away. Mont Cervin beckons to his brother, the gigantic Finsteraarhorn, across tracts of liquid ether. Bells are rising from the villages, now wrapped in gloom, between me and the glimmering lake. A hush of evening silence falls upon the ridges, cliffs, and forests of this billowy hill, ascending into wave-like crests, and toppling with awful chasms over the dark waters of Lugano. It is good to be alone here at this hour. Yet I must rise and go--pa.s.sing through meadows, where white lilies sleep in silvery drifts, and asphodel is pale with spires of faintest rose, and narcissus dreams of his own beauty, loading the air with fragrance sweet as some love-music of Mozart. These fields want only the white figure of Persephone to make them poems: and in this twilight one might fancy that the queen had left her throne by Pluto"s side, to mourn for her dead youth among the flowers uplifted between earth and heaven. Nay, they are poems now, these fields; with that unchanging background of history, romance, and human life--the Lombard plain, against whose violet breadth the blossoms bend their faint heads to the evening air. Downward we hurry, on pathways where the beeches meet, by silent farms, by meadows honey-scented, deep in dew. The columbine stands tall and still on those green slopes of shadowy gra.s.s. The nightingale sings now, and now is hushed again. Streams murmur through the darkness, where the growth of trees, heavy with honeysuckle and wild rose, is thickest.