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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 42163 ***
+
+MASTERPIECES IN COLOUR
+
+EDITED BY--T. LEMAN HARE
+
+
+BERNARDINO LUINI
+
+
+
+
+IN THE SAME SERIES
+
+    ARTIST.             AUTHOR.
+  VELAZQUEZ.          S. L. BENSUSAN.
+  REYNOLDS.           S. L. BENSUSAN.
+  TURNER.             C. LEWIS HIND.
+  ROMNEY.             C. LEWIS HIND.
+  GREUZE.             ALYS EYRE MACKLIN.
+  BOTTICELLI.         HENRY B. BINNS.
+  ROSSETTI.           LUCIEN PISSARRO.
+  BELLINI.            GEORGE HAY.
+  FRA ANGELICO.       JAMES MASON.
+  REMBRANDT.          JOSEF ISRAELS.
+  LEIGHTON.           A. LYS BALDRY.
+  RAPHAEL.            PAUL G. KONODY.
+  HOLMAN HUNT.        MARY E. COLERIDGE.
+  TITIAN.             S. L. BENSUSAN.
+  MILLAIS.            A. LYS BALDRY.
+  CARLO DOLCI.        GEORGE HAY.
+  GAINSBOROUGH.       MAX ROTHSCHILD.
+  TINTORETTO.         S. L. BENSUSAN.
+  LUINI.              JAMES MASON.
+  FRANZ HALS.         EDGCUMBE STALEY.
+
+_In Preparation_
+
+  VAN DYCK.           PERCY M. TURNER.
+  WHISTLER.           T. MARTIN WOOD.
+  LEONARDO DA VINCI.  M. W. BROCKWELL.
+  RUBENS.             S. L. BENSUSAN.
+  BURNE-JONES.        A. LYS BALDRY.
+  J. F. MILLET.       PERCY M. TURNER.
+  CHARDIN.            PAUL G. KONODY.
+  FRAGONARD.          C. HALDANE MACFALL.
+  HOLBEIN.            S. L. BENSUSAN.
+  BOUCHER.            C. HALDANE MACFALL.
+  VIGÉE LE BRUN.      C. HALDANE MACFALL.
+  WATTEAU.            C. LEWIS HIND.
+  MURILLO.            S. L. BENSUSAN.
+
+AND OTHERS.
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: PLATE I.--MADONNA AND CHILD. Frontispiece
+
+(In the Wallace Collection)
+
+This is another admirably painted study of the artist's favourite
+subject. The attitude of the child is most engaging, the painting of
+the limbs is full of skill, and the background adds considerably to
+the picture's attractions. It will be noted that Luini appears to have
+employed the same model for most of his studies of the Madonna.]
+
+
+
+
+Bernardino LUINI
+
+BY JAMES MASON
+
+ILLUSTRATED WITH EIGHT REPRODUCTIONS IN COLOUR
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+LONDON: T. C. & E. C. JACK
+
+NEW YORK: FREDERICK A. STOKES CO.
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+  Plate
+     I. Madonna and Child                     Frontispiece
+          In the Wallace Collection
+                                                      Page
+    II. Il Salvatore                                    14
+          In the Ambrosiana, Milan
+
+   III. Salomé and the Head of St. John the Baptist     24
+          In the Uffizi Gallery, Florence
+
+    IV. The Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine            34
+          In the Brera, Milan
+
+     V. The Madonna of the Rose                         40
+          In the Brera, Milan
+
+    VI. Detail of Fresco                                50
+          In the Brera, Milan
+
+   VII. Head of Virgin                                  60
+          In the Ambrosiana, Milan
+
+  VIII. Burial of St. Catherine                         70
+          In the Brera, Milan
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+I
+
+A RETROSPECT
+
+
+In the beginning of the long and fascinating history of Italian Art we
+see that the spirit of the Renaissance first fluttered over the minds
+of men much as the spirit of life is said have moved over the face of
+the waters before the first chapter of creation's marvellous story was
+written. Beginnings were small, progress was slow, and the lives of
+the great artists moved very unevenly to their appointed end.
+
+There were some who rose to fame and fortune during their life, and
+then died so completely that no biography can hope to rouse any
+interest in their work among succeeding generations.
+
+There were others who worked in silence and without _réclame_ of any
+sort, content with the respect and esteem of those with whom they came
+into immediate contact, indifferent to the plaudits of the crowd or
+the noisy praises of those who are not qualified to judge. True
+servants of the western world's religion, they translated work into
+terms of moral life, and moral life into terms of work. Merit like
+truth will out, and when time has sifted good work from bad and
+spurious reputations from genuine ones, many men who fluttered the
+dovecotes of their own generation disappear from sight altogether;
+some others who wrought unseen, never striving to gain the popular ear
+or eye, rise on a sudden to heights that might have made them giddy
+had they lived to be conscious of their own elevation. They were
+lowly, but their fame inherits the earth.
+
+Bernardino Luini, the subject of this little study, calls us away from
+the great art centres--from Venice and Florence and Rome; his record
+was made and is to be found to-day amid the plains of Lombardy. Milan
+is not always regarded as one of the great art centres of Italy in
+spite of the Brera, the Ambrosiana, and the Poldi Pezzoli Palace
+collections, but no lover of pictures ever went for the first time to
+the galleries of Milan in a reverent spirit and with a patient eye
+without feeling that he had discovered a painter of genius. He may not
+even have heard his name before, but he will come away quite
+determined to learn all he may about the man who painted the wonderful
+frescoes that seem destined to retain their spiritual beauty till the
+last faint trace of the design passes beyond the reach of the eye, the
+man who painted the panel picture of the "Virgin of the Rose Trees,"
+reproduced with other of his master-works in these pages.
+
+[Illustration: PLATE II.--IL SALVATORE
+
+(In the Ambrosiana, Milan)
+
+This picture, one of the treasures of the beautiful collection in the
+Pinacoteca of Ambrosiana in the Piazza della Rosa, hangs by the same
+artist's picture of "John the Baptist as a Child." The right hand of
+Christ is raised in the attitude of benediction, and the head has a
+curiously genuine beauty. The preservation of this picture is
+wonderful, the colouring retains much of its early glow. The head is
+almost feminine in its tenderness and bears a likeness to Luini's
+favourite model.]
+
+To go to the Brera is to feel something akin to hunger for the history
+of Bernardino Luini or Luino or Luvino as he is called by the few
+who have found occasion to mention him, although perhaps Luini is the
+generally accepted and best known spelling of the name. Unfortunately
+the hungry feeling cannot be fully satisfied. Catalogues or guide
+books date the year of Luini's birth at or about 1470, and tell us
+that he died in 1533, and as this is a period that Giorgio Vasari
+covers, we turn eagerly to the well-remembered volumes of the old
+gossip hoping to find some stories of the Lombard painter's life and
+work. We are eager to know what manner of man Luini was, what forces
+influenced him, how he appeared to his contemporaries, whether he had
+a fair measure of the large success that attended the leading artists
+of his day. Were his patrons great men who rewarded him as he
+deserved--how did he fare when the evening came wherein no man may
+work? Surely there is ample scope for the score of quaint comments and
+amusing if unreliable anecdotes with which Vasari livens his pages. We
+are confident that there will be much to reward the search, because
+Bernardino Luini and Giorgio Vasari were contemporaries after a
+fashion. Vasari would have been twenty-one years old when Luini died,
+the writer of the "Lives" would have seen frescoes and panel pictures
+in all the glory of their first creation. He could not have failed to
+be impressed by the extraordinary beauty of the artist's conceptions,
+the skill of his treatment of single figures, the wealth of the
+curious and elusive charm that we call atmosphere--a charm to which
+all the world's masterpieces are indebted in varying degrees--the
+all-pervading sense of a delightful and refined personality, leaves
+us eager for the facts that must have been well within the grasp of
+the painter's contemporaries.
+
+Alas for these expectations! Vasari dismisses Bernardino del Lupino,
+as he calls him, in six or eight sentences, and what he says has no
+biographical value at all. The reference reads suspiciously like what
+is known in the world of journalism as padding. Indeed, as Vasari was
+a fair judge, and Bernardino Luini was not one of those Venetians whom
+Vasari held more or less in contempt, there seems to be some reason
+for the silence. Perhaps it was an intimate and personal one, some
+unrecorded bitterness between the painter and one of Vasari's friends,
+or between Vasari himself and Luini or one of his brothers or
+children. Whatever the cause there is no mistake about the result. We
+grumble at Vasari, we ridicule his inaccuracies, we regret his
+limitations, we scoff at his prejudices, but when he withholds the
+light of his investigation from contemporary painters who did not
+enjoy the favour of popes and emperors, we wander in a desert land
+without a guide, and search with little or no success for the details
+that would serve to set the painter before us.
+
+Many men have taken up the work of investigation, for Luini grows
+steadily in favour and esteem, but what Vasari might have done in a
+week nobody has achieved in a decade.
+
+A few unimportant church documents relating to commissions given to
+the painter are still extant. He wrote a few words on his frescoes;
+here and there a stray reference appears in the works of Italian
+writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but our knowledge
+when it has been sifted and arranged is remarkably small and
+deplorably incomplete. Dr. J. C. Williamson, a painstaking critic and
+a competent scholar, has written an interesting volume dealing with
+the painter, and in the making of it he has consulted nearly fifty
+authorities--Italian, French, English, and German--only to find it is
+impossible to gather a short chapter of reliable and consecutive
+biography from them all. Our only hope lies in the discovery of some
+rich store of information in the public or private libraries of Milan
+among the manuscripts that are the delight of the scholars. Countless
+documents lie unread, many famous libraries are uncatalogued, the
+archives of several noble Italian houses that played an important part
+in fifteenth and sixteenth century Italy have still to be given to the
+world. It is not unreasonable to suppose that records of Luini's life
+exist, and in these days when scholarship is ever extending its
+boundaries there is hope that some scholar will lay the ever growing
+circle of the painter's admirers under lasting obligations. Until that
+time comes we must be content to know the man through the work that he
+has left behind him, through the medium of fading frescoes, stray
+altarpieces, and a few panel pictures. Happily they have a definite
+and pleasant story to tell.
+
+We must go to Milan for Luini just as we must go to Rome for Raphael
+and to Madrid for Velazquez and Titian and to Venice for Jacopo
+Robusti whom men still call the Little Dyer (Tintoretto). In London we
+have one painting on wood, "Christ and the Pharisees," brought from
+the Borghese Palace in Rome. The head of Christ is strangely feminine,
+the four Pharisees round him are finely painted, and the picture has
+probably been attributed to Leonardo da Vinci at some period of its
+career. There are three frescoes in South Kensington and a few panel
+pictures in private collections. The Louvre is more fortunate than our
+National Gallery, it has several frescoes and two or three panels. In
+Switzerland, in the Church of St. Mary and the Angels in Lugano, is a
+wonderful screen picture of the "Passion of Christ" with some hundreds
+of figures in it, and the rest of Luini's work seems to be in Italy.
+The greater part is to be found in Milan, some important frescoes
+having been brought to the Brera from the house of the Pelucca family
+in Monza, while there are some important works in Florence in the
+Pitti and Uffizi Galleries. In the Church of St. Peter at Luino on the
+shores of Lake Maggiore, the little town where Benardino was born and
+from which he took his name, there are some frescoes but they are in a
+very faded condition. The people of the lake side town have much to
+say about the master who has made Luino a place of pilgrimage but
+their stories are quite unreliable.
+
+[Illustration: PLATE III.--SALOMÉ AND THE HEAD OF ST. JOHN THE BAPTIST
+
+(In the Uffizi Gallery, Florence)
+
+In this striking and finely preserved picture Bernardino Luini has
+contrived to avoid all sense of horror. The head of the dead John the
+Baptist is full of beauty, and even Herodias is handled without any
+attempt to make her repulsive. Sufficient contrast is supplied by the
+executioner on the right.]
+
+It might be held, seeing that the artist's work is scanty, and often
+in the last stages of decay, while his life story has faded quite from
+the recovered records of his contemporaries, that Luini is hardly fit
+subject for discussion here. In a series of little books that
+seeks to introduce great artists to new friends through the medium of
+reproductions that show the work as it is, and a brief concise
+description that aims at helping those who are interested to study the
+master for themselves, there is a temptation to deal only with popular
+men. These give no trouble to their biographer or his readers, but
+after all it is not the number of pictures that an artist paints or
+the wealth of detail that his admirers have collected that establishes
+his claim to be placed among the immortals. His claim rests upon the
+quality of the work done, its relation to the times in which it was
+painted, the mood or spirit it reveals, the light it throws upon the
+mind that conceived and the hand that executed it.
+
+We know enough and to spare of the more flamboyant personalities of
+the Venetian and Florentine schools. Long periods of study will not
+exhaust all there is to learn about men like Titian, Michelangelo,
+Raphael of Urbino, and the rest, but Luini, though he left no written
+record, will not be denied. We dare not pass him by, seeing that we
+may introduce him to some admirers who will, in days to come, seek and
+find what remains beyond our reach at present. His appeal is so
+irresistible, the beauty of his work is so rare and so enduring that
+we must endeavour to the best of our ability, however small it be, to
+declare his praise, to stimulate inquiry, enlarge his circle, and give
+him the place that belongs to him of right. There are painters in
+plenty whose work is admired and praised, whose claims we acknowledge
+instantly while admitting to ourselves that we should not care to live
+with their pictures hanging on round us. The qualities of cleverness
+and brilliance pall after a little time, the mere conquest of
+technical difficulties of the kind that have been self-inflicted
+rouses admiration for a while and then leaves us cold. But the man who
+is the happy possessor of a fresco or a panel picture by Luini is to
+be envied. Even he who lives in the neighbourhood of some gallery or
+church and only sees the rare master's works where, "blackening in the
+daily candle smoke, they moulder on the damp wall's travertine," will
+never tire of Luini's company. He will always find inspiration,
+encouragement, or consolation in the reflection of the serene and
+beautiful outlook upon life that gave the work so much of its
+enduring merit. Luini, whatever manner of man he may have been, was so
+clearly enamoured of beauty, so clearly intolerant of what is ugly and
+unrefined, that he shrank from all that was coarse and revolting
+either in the life around him or in certain aspects of the Bible
+stories that gave him subjects for his brush. Beauty and simplicity
+were the objects of his unceasing search, his most exquisite
+expression.
+
+Like all other great painters he had his marked periods of
+development, his best work was done in the last years of his life, but
+there is nothing mean or trivial in any picture that he painted and
+this is the more to his credit because we know from the documents
+existing to-day that he lived in the world and not in the cloister.
+We admire the perennial serenity of Beato Angelico, we rejoice with
+him in his exquisite religious visions. The peaceful quality of his
+painting and the happy certainty of his faith move us to the deepest
+admiration, but we may not forget that Angelico lived from the time
+when he was little more than a boy to the years when he was an old man
+in the untroubled atmosphere of the monastery of San Marco in
+Florence, that whether he was at home in that most favoured city or
+working in the Vatican at Rome, he had no worldly troubles. Honour,
+peace, and a mind at peace with the world were with him always.
+
+Bernardino Luini on the other hand travelled from one town in Italy to
+another, employed by religious houses from time to time, but always as
+an artist who could be relied upon to do good work cheaply. He could
+not have been rich, he could hardly have been famous, it is even
+reasonable to suppose that his circumstances were straitened, and on
+this account the unbroken serenity of his work and his faithful
+devotion to beauty are the more worthy of our praise. What was
+beautiful in his life and work came from within, not from without, and
+perhaps because he was a stranger to the cloistered seclusion that
+made Fra Angelico's life so pleasantly uneventful his work shows
+certain elements of strength that are lacking from the frescoes that
+adorn the walls of San Marco to this day. To his contemporaries he was
+no more than a little planet wandering at will round those fixed stars
+of the first magnitude that lighted all the world of art. Now some of
+those great stars have lost their light and the little planet shines
+as clear as Hesperus.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+As we have said already nothing is known of Luini's early life,
+although the fact that he was born at Luino on the Lago Maggiore seems
+to be beyond dispute. The people of that little lake side town have no
+doubt at all about the matter, and they say that the family was one of
+some distinction, that Giacomo of Luino who founded a monastery in his
+native place was the painter's uncle. Perhaps the wish was father to
+the thought, and because every man who sets out to study the life and
+work of an artist is as anxious to know as was Miss Rosa Dartle
+herself, there are always facts of a sort at his service. He who
+seeks the truth can always be supplied with something as much like it
+as paste is to diamonds, and can supplement the written word with the
+aid of tradition. The early life of the artist is a blank, and the
+authorities are by no means in agreement about the year of his birth.
+1470 would seem to be a reasonable date, with a little latitude on
+either side. Many men writing long years after the painter's death,
+have held that he was a pupil of Leonardo da Vinci, indeed several
+pictures that were attributed to da Vinci by the authorities of
+different European galleries are now recognised as Luini's work, but
+the mistake is not at all difficult to explain. If we turn to "La
+Joconda," a portrait by da Vinci that hangs in the Louvre to-day, and
+is apparently beyond dispute in the eyes of the present generation
+of critics, and then go through the Brera in Milan with a photograph
+of "La Joconda's" portrait in our hand, it will be impossible to
+overlook the striking resemblance between Luini's types and da Vinci's
+smiling model. Leonardo had an academy in Milan, and it is reasonable
+to suppose that Luini worked in it, although at the time when he is
+supposed to have come for the first time to the capital of Lombardy,
+Leonardo da Vinci had left, apparently because Louis XII. of France,
+cousin and successor of that Charles VIII. who had troubled the peace
+of Italy for so long, was thundering at the city gates, and at such a
+time great artists were apt to remember that they had good patrons
+elsewhere. The school may, however, have remained open because no
+great rulers made war on artists, and Luini would have learned
+something of the spirit that animated Leonardo's pictures. For other
+masters and influence he seems to have gone to Bramantino and Foppa.
+Bramantino was a painter of Milan and Ambrosio Foppa known as
+Caradosso was a native of Pavia and should not be reckoned among
+Milanese artists as he has so often been. He was renowned for the
+beauty of his medals and his goldsmith's work; and he was one of the
+men employed by the great family of Bentivoglio.
+
+[Illustration: PLATE IV.--THE MYSTIC MARRIAGE OF ST. CATHERINE
+
+(In the Brera, Milan)
+
+This is a singularly attractive picture in which the child Christ may
+be seen placing the ring upon the finger of St. Catherine. The little
+open background, although free from the slightest suggestion of
+Palestine, is very charming, and the head of the Virgin and St.
+Catherine help to prove that Luini used few models.]
+
+It may be mentioned in this place that many Italian artists,
+particularly those of the Florentine schools, suffered very greatly
+from their unceasing devotion to the art of the miniaturist. They
+sought to achieve his detail, his fine but cramped handling, and this
+endeavour was fatal to them when they came to paint large pictures
+that demanded skilled composition, and the subordination of detail to
+a large general effect. The influence of the miniature painter and the
+maker of medals kept many a fifteenth-century painter in the second
+grade and Luini never quite survived his early devotion to their
+methods, often making the fatal mistake of covering a large canvas
+with many figures of varying size but equal value. It may be remarked
+that Tintoretto was the first great painter of the Renaissance who
+learned to subordinate parts to the whole, and he had to face a great
+deal of unpopularity because he saw with his own eyes instead of using
+those of his predecessors.
+
+[Illustration: PLATE V.--THE MADONNA OF THE ROSE
+
+(In the Brera, Milan)
+
+Modern criticism proclaims this picture of the Virgin in a Bower of
+Roses to be the finest of the master's paintings. Not only is it
+delightfully composed and thought out but the background is painted
+with rare skill, and the colour is rich and pleasing to this day.]
+
+It may be suggested, with all possible respect to those who hold
+different opinions, that Luini, though he responded to certain
+influences, had no master in the generally accepted sense of the term.
+One cannot trace the definite relation between him and any older
+painter that we find between Titian and Gian Bellini, for example. He
+took a certain type from Leonardo, his handling from time to time
+recalls the other masters--we have already referred to the most
+important of these--but had he studied in the school of one man, had
+he served an apprenticeship after the fashion of his contemporaries,
+his pictures would surely have been free from those faults of
+composition and perspective that detract so much from the value of the
+big works. He seems to have been self-taught rather than to have been
+a schoolman. While his single figures are wholly admirable whether
+on fresco or on panel, his grouping is nearly always ineffective,
+one might say childish, and his sense of perspective is by no means
+equal to that of his greatest contemporaries. As a draughtsman and a
+colourist Luini had little to learn from anybody, and the poetry of
+his conceptions is best understood when it is remembered that he was a
+poet as well as a painter. He is said to have written poems and
+essays, though we are not in a position to say where they are to be
+found, and it is clear that he had a singularly detached spirit and
+that the hand of a skilled painter was associated with the mind of a
+little child. In some aspects he is as simple as those primitive
+painters of Umbria whose backgrounds are all of gold. Like so many
+other painters of the Renaissance Luini's saints and angels are
+peasant folk, the people he saw around him. He may have idealised
+them, but they remain as they were made.
+
+A few records of the prices paid for Luini's work exist among the
+documents belonging to churches and religious houses, and while they
+justify a belief that at the time he came to Milan Luini had achieved
+some measure of distinction in his calling, they seem to prove that he
+was hardly regarded as a great painter. The prices paid to him are
+ridiculously small, no more than a living wage, but he had the
+reputation of being a reliable and painstaking artist and he would
+seem to have been content with a small reward for work that appealed
+to him. His early commissions executed in and around Milan when he
+first came from Luini were numerous and consisted very largely of
+frescoes which are the work of a young man who has not yet freed his
+own individuality from the influence of his elders. One of the most
+charming works associated with this period is the "Burial of St.
+Catherine," which is reproduced in these pages. The composition is
+simple enough, the handling does not touch the summit of the painter's
+later achievements, but the sentiment of the picture is quite
+delightful. St. Catherine is conceived in a spirit of deepest
+reverence and devotion, but the angels are just Lombardy peasant girls
+born to labour in the fields and now decorated with wings in honour of
+a great occasion. And yet the man who could paint this fresco and
+could show so unmistakably his own simple faith in the story it sets
+out, was a poet as well as a painter even though he had never written
+a line, while the treatment of his other contemporary frescoes and
+the fine feeling for appropriate colour suggest a great future for the
+artist who had not yet reached middle age. We see that Luini devoted
+his brush to mythological and sacred subjects, touching sacred history
+with a reverent hand, shutting his eyes to all that was painful,
+expressing all that was pitiful or calculated to strengthen the hold
+of religion upon the mass in fashion destined to appeal though in
+changing fashion for at least four centuries. Where the works have
+failed to triumph as expressions of a living faith they have charmed
+agnostics as an expression of enduring beauty.
+
+From Milan Luini seems to have gone to Monza, a city a few miles away
+from the capital of Lombardy where the rulers of united Italy come
+after their coronation to receive the iron crown that has been worn by
+the kings of Lombardy for nearly a thousand years. This is the city in
+which the late King Umberto, that brave and good man, was foully
+murdered by an anarchist. To-day one reaches Monza by the help of a
+steam-tram that blunders heavily enough over the wide flat Lombardy
+plain. The Milanese go to Monza for the sake of an outing, but most of
+the tourists who throng the city stay away, and it is possible to
+spend a few pleasant hours in the cathedral and churches with never a
+flutter of red-covered guide book to distract one's attention from the
+matters to which the hasty tourist is blind. Here Luini painted
+frescoes, and it is known that he stayed for a long time at the house
+of one of the strong men of Monza and painted a large number of
+frescoes there. To-day the fortress, if it was one, has become a
+farmhouse, and the frescoes, more than a dozen in all, have been taken
+away to the Royal Palace in Milan. Dr. Williamson in his interesting
+volume to which the student of Luini must be deeply indebted, says
+that there is one left at the Casa Pelucca. The writer in the course
+of two days spent in Monza was unfortunate enough to overlook it.
+
+It has been stated that the facts relating to Luini's life are few and
+far between. Fiction on the other hand is plentiful, and there is a
+story that Luini, shortly after his arrival in Milan, was held
+responsible by the populace for the death of a priest who fell from a
+hastily erected scaffolding in the church of San Giorgio where the
+artist was working. The rest of the legend follows familiar lines that
+would serve the life story of any leading artist of the time, seeing
+that they all painted altar-pieces and used scaffolding. He is said to
+have fled to Monza, to have been received by the chief of the Pelucca
+family, to have paid for his protection with the frescoes that have
+now been brought from Monza to the Brera, to have fallen violently in
+love with the beautiful daughter of the house, to have engaged in
+heroic contests against great odds on her behalf, and so on, _ad
+absurdum_. If we look at the portraits the painter is said to have
+made of himself and to have placed in pictures at Saronna and
+elsewhere we shall see that Luini was hardly the type of man to have
+engaged in the idle pursuits of chivalry in the intervals of the work
+to which his life was given. We have the head of a man of thought not
+that of a man of action, and all the character of the face gives the
+lie to the suggestions of the storytellers. It is clear, however, that
+the painter made a long stay in Monza and when he came back to Milan
+he worked for the churches of St. Maurizio, Santa Maria della Pace,
+Santa Maria di Brera, and St. Ambrosia.
+
+[Illustration: PLATE VI.--DETAIL OF FRESCO
+
+(In the Brera, Milan)
+
+This prettily posed figure is at the base of a fresco of the Virgin
+with Saints in the Brera. Part of the artist's signature (Bernardinus
+Louinus) may be seen below. It will be remembered that Carpaccio
+painted a very similar subject. The fresco is not too well preserved.]
+
+In Milan he found a great patron, no less a man than Giovanni
+Bentivoglio who had been driven from his rule over Bologna by the
+"Terrible Pontiff" Julius II., that life-long opponent and bitter
+enemy of the Borgia Pope Alexander VI. Alessandro Bentivoglio, the son
+of the ruined Giovanni, married Ippolita Sforza, daughter of one
+of the house that had done so much to rule Rome until Pope
+Alexander VI. broke its power. Alessandro Bentivoglio commissioned
+Luini to paint altar-pieces in St. Maurizio where his father was
+buried, and the painter included in his work a portrait of Ippolita
+Sforza with three female saints. He did much other work in this
+church; some of it has faded almost beyond recognition.
+
+At the same time there is no need to think that we have recovered the
+last work of Luini or indeed of the great masters even in the churches
+of Italy. Only a few months ago the writer was in a small Italian
+church that had suffered a few years ago from disastrous floods. The
+water unable to find no outlet had risen for a time almost to the top
+of the supporting columns. The smooth wall above was plastered, and
+when the waters had subsided it was found that the plaster had become
+so damaged that it was necessary to remove it. Happily the work was
+done carefully, for under the whitewash some excellent frescoes were
+discovered. They would seem to have profited by their covering for as
+much as has been uncovered is rich and well preserved. It may be that
+in days when the State of Italy was seriously disturbed, and Napoleon,
+greatest of highwaymen and conquerors, after being crowned in Milan
+with the famous Monza crown, was laying his hand on all that seemed
+worth carrying away, some one in authority thought of this simple
+method of concealment, and obtained expert advice that enabled the
+frescoes to be covered without serious damage. Under similar
+conditions we may yet discover some of the earlier work of Luini,
+because it is clear that the years in which his reputation was in the
+making must have been full of achievement of which the greater part
+has now been lost. He could hardly have been less than thirty years of
+age when he came to Milan with a reputation sufficient to gain
+commissions for work in churches; that reputation must have taken
+years to acquire, and must have been associated with very definite
+accomplishment. The lack of all record was essentially the misfortune
+that beset men who were not very high in the esteem of their
+contemporaries. A painter like Luini would have executed a great many
+pictures for people who could not pay very well, and had no great
+gallery or well-built church to harbour the work, and in the course
+of time the work would tend inevitably to disappear before the
+devouring candle-smoke, or to be carried away by unscrupulous
+purchasers who chanced to be better equipped with taste than
+conscience. On the other hand, painters who led the various movements
+of their time would be honoured by successive generations and their
+work would be stored in the best and safest places. To be sure, fire
+was never a respecter of palaces or persons, and the flames have
+consumed more work than a collection of the finest Renaissance
+pictures in existence could show, but even then the odds seem to be in
+favour of the bigger men because special efforts would be made to save
+their paintings while those of lesser men would be left with few
+regrets to take their chance.
+
+When Luini was engaged to work in the Church of St. Maurizio there was
+a fair chance that his altar-pieces and frescoes would be well looked
+after, but when he worked for a small provincial family like the
+Pelucca the house sank with the family fortunes till at last it became
+a farm, and in the early years of the nineteenth century the frescoes
+were taken from the walls with as much care as was deemed advisable.
+Doubtless Luini worked for many men whose worldly position was not as
+considerable as that of the Pelucca family, and that work may have
+disappeared altogether. The painter, as we have seen, did not enjoy
+the patronage of many great men before Alessandro Bentivoglio, and
+large institutions were not numbered among his early clients. But he
+was not altogether without valuable patronage in the latter days, and
+in the early 'twenties of the sixteenth century the influential
+Brotherhood of the Holy Crown, one of the leading charitable
+institutions of Milan, would seem to have given him some official
+connection with their institution; a recognised position without fixed
+salary. For them he painted the magnificent frescoes now in the
+Ambrosian Library. The great work there was divided by the artist into
+three parts separated by pillars. In the centre Luini has depicted the
+crowning with thorns, Christ being seated upon a throne while thorns
+are being put upon His head; His arms are crossed; His expression one
+of supreme resignation. Above Him little angels look down or point
+to a cartouche on which is written "Caput Regis Gloriæ Spinis
+Coranatur." In the left hand division of the fresco and on the right,
+the fore-ground is filled with kneeling figures whose heads are
+supposed to be portraits of the most prominent members of the Society.
+Clearly they are all men who have achieved some measure of honour and
+distinction. Above the kneeling figures on the left hand side St. John
+is pointing out the tragedy of the central picture to the Virgin Mary,
+while on the right hand side a man in armour and another who is seen
+faintly behind him call the attention of a third to what is happening.
+A crown of thorns hangs above the right and the left hand compartment
+and there is a landscape for background. It is recorded that this work
+took about six months, and was finished in March 1522 at a cost to the
+Society of 115 soldi. So Luini's work looks down to-day upon a part
+of the great Ambrosian Library, and it may well be that the library
+itself will yield to patient investigation some record, however
+simple, of the painter's life, sufficient perhaps to enable us to
+readjust our mental focus and see his lovable figure more clearly.
+
+[Illustration: PLATE VII.--HEAD OF VIRGIN
+
+(In the Ambrosiana, Milan)
+
+Here we have another well painted and finely preserved head painted
+from one of Luini's favourite models. The artist must have known most
+of the secrets of colour preparation, for his work has survived much
+that was painted centuries later. Unfortunately his frescoes were
+exposed to the elements and have suffered accordingly.]
+
+It may be urged that for those of us who are content to see with the
+spiritual eye Luini is expressed more eloquently by his work, and
+particularly by this great picture in the Ambrosian Library, than he
+could hope to be by the combined efforts of half-a-dozen critics, each
+with his own special point of view and his properly profound contempt
+for the views of others. The painter's low tones and subtle harmonies,
+his pure but limited vision, speak to us of a gentle, refined, and
+delicate nature, of an achievement that stopped short of
+cleverness and consequently limited him to the quieter byways of
+artistic life, while those whose inspiration was less, and whose gifts
+were more, moved with much pomp and circumstance before admiring
+contemporaries. The refined mind, the sensitive soul, shrank from
+depicting the tragedy of the Crown of Thorns in the realistic fashion
+that would have proved acceptable to so many other artists. Luini
+forgets the blood and the spikes, he almost forgets the physical pain,
+and gives us the Man of Sorrows who has forgiven His tormentors
+because "they know not what they do."
+
+Continental galleries show us many treatments of the same familiar
+theme, they have none to show that can vie with this in a combination
+of strength and delicacy that sets out an immortal story while
+avoiding the brutal realism to which so many other artists have
+succumbed. We may suppose that the objects of the Society roused
+Luini's sympathy to an extent that made it easy for him to accept the
+somewhat paltry remuneration with which the Brotherhood of the Holy
+Crown rewarded him, and so the picture makes its own appeal on the
+painter's behalf, and tells a story of his claims upon our regard. A
+man may lie, in fact it may be suggested on the strength of the
+Psalmist's statement that most men do, but an artist's life work tells
+his story in spite of himself, and if he labour with pen or brush his
+truest biography will be seen in what he leaves behind him. It is not
+possible to play a part throughout all the vicissitudes of a long
+career, and no man could have given us the pictures that Luini has
+left unless he chanced to be a choice and rare spirit. We may remember
+here and now that the time was richer in violent contrasts than any of
+its successors, the most deplorable excesses on the one hand, the most
+rigid virtues on the other, seem to have been the special product of
+the Renaissance. While there were men who practised every vice under
+the sun there were others who sought to arrest Divine Retribution by
+the pursuit of all the virtues, and while the progress of the years
+has to a certain extent made men neutral tinted in character, the
+season of the Renaissance was one of violent contrasts. On behalf of
+the section that went in pursuit of righteousness let it be remembered
+that heaven and the saints were not matters for speculation, they
+were certainties. Every man knew that God was in heaven, and that if
+the workers of iniquity flourished, it was that they might be
+destroyed for ever. Every man knew that the saints still exerted their
+supernatural powers and would come down to earth if need be to protect
+a devotee. Satan, on the other hand, went armed about the earth
+seeking whom he might devour, and hell was as firmly fixed as heaven.
+In order to understand Luini, his life and times, these facts must be
+borne in mind. The greater the unrest in the cities the more the
+public attention would be turned to statesmen and warriors, and when
+the personalities of artists began to be considered, those who lived
+and thrived in the entourage of popes and rulers monopolised the
+attention. Hundreds of men were at work earning a fair living and
+some local repute, it was left to foreign favour to set a seal upon
+success. Had Luini chanced to be invited to Venice or to Rome he would
+have been honoured throughout Lombardy; but a painter like a prophet
+is often without honour in his own country. Luini's gifts were of a
+more quiet and domestic order than those of his great contemporaries
+Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, for example, were more than
+painters, and perhaps it was only in Venice that painting stood by
+itself and managed to thrive alone. Luini would have come into his
+kingdom while he lived had Venice been his birthplace. The genius of
+the Florentine school sought to express itself in half-a-dozen
+different ways, no triumph in one department of work could satisfy men
+whose longing for self-expression was insatiable. In those days it
+was possible for a man to make himself master of all knowledge,
+literally he could discourse _de omnibus rebus et quibusdam aliis_.
+And this diffusion of interests was fatal to many a genius that might
+have moved to amazing triumph along one road.
+
+It is clear that Bernardino Luini never travelled very far from his
+native country either physically or mentally. In the eyes of his
+contemporaries he was not a man of sufficient importance to receive
+commissions from the great art centres of Italy. This, of course, may
+be because he did not have the good fortune to attract the attention
+of the connoisseurs of his day, for we find that outside Milan, and
+the little town of Luino where he was born and whence he took his
+name, his work was done in comparatively small towns like Como,
+Legnano, Lugano, Ponte, and Saronno. Milan and Monza may be
+disregarded because we have already dealt with the work there.
+Saronno, which lies some fourteen miles north-west of Milan, is little
+more than a village to-day, and its chief claim upon the attention of
+the traveller is its excellent gingerbread for which it is famous
+throughout Lombardy. It has a celebrated church known as the Sanctuary
+of the Blessed Virgin and here one finds some very fine examples of
+our painter's frescoes. Some of the frescoes in the church are painted
+by Cesare del Magno others by Lanini, and the rest are from the hand
+of Bernardino Luini. Round these frescoes, which are of abiding
+beauty, and include fine studies of the great plague saint, St. Roque,
+and that very popular martyr St. Sebastian, many legends congregate.
+It is said that Luini having killed a man in a brawl fled from Milan
+to the Church of the Blessed Virgin in Monza to claim sanctuary at the
+hand of the monks. They gave him the refuge he demanded, and, says the
+legend, he paid for it with frescoes. This is little more than a
+variant of the story that he went to Monza under similar circumstances
+and obtained the protection of the Pelucca family on the same terms.
+In the absence of anything in the nature of reliable record this story
+has been able to pass, but against it one likes to put the tradition
+that one of the heads in the frescoes is that of Luini himself. We
+find that head so simple, so refined, and so old--the beard is long
+and the hair is scanty--and so serene in its expression that it is
+exceedingly difficult to believe that brawling could have entered into
+the artist's life.
+
+[Illustration: PLATE VIII.--BURIAL OF ST. CATHERINE
+
+(In the Brera, Milan)
+
+This is one of the frescoes painted by Luini for the Casa Pelucca and
+transferred to Milan in the beginning of the nineteenth century. It
+will be seen that although the three angels bearing the Saint to her
+grave are obviously peasant girls from the plains of Lombardy winged
+for the occasion, the artist has handled his subject with faith and
+reverence. The fresco is better preserved than others from the same
+house.]
+
+The subjects of the pictures in Saronno's Sanctuary are all biblical.
+We have an Adoration of the Magi, showing the same muddled composition
+that detracts from the other merits of the artist's work; a beautiful
+Presentation in the Temple in which the composition is a great deal
+better; and a perfectly delightful Nativity. There is a Christ is
+Disputing with the Doctors, and this is the picture in which we find
+the head that is said to be a portrait of the painter himself. Two
+female saints figure in another picture, and Luini's favourites St.
+Roque and St. Sebastian are not forgotten. Certainly if the monks
+obtained all that work at the price of the painter's safety they were
+very fortunate in his choice of sanctuary.
+
+Como is, of course, a more important town with large industries and
+important factories, and one of the finest cathedrals in northern
+Italy. For the interior Luini painted another Adoration of the Magi
+and another of his favourite Nativities. It is not easy to speak about
+the conditions under which this work was done, and the inhabitants
+have so many more profitable matters to attend to that they do not
+seem to trouble themselves about the history of the painter who helped
+to make their beautiful cathedral still more beautiful.
+
+Legnano, with its memories of Frederick Barbarossa, is within twenty
+miles of Milan, and for the Church of San Magno Luini painted one of
+his finest altar-pieces. It is in seven divisions and has earned as
+much critical admiration as any work from the master's brush.
+
+Lugano is of course in Switzerland, well across the Italian border. It
+is a popular place enough to-day, and so far as we can tell, it was
+the city in which Luini painted his last pictures. He must have left
+Milan about 1528 or 1529, and he would seem to have gone there to
+execute commissions, for in the Church of Santa Maria degli Angioli we
+find some of his latest and finest work. The Crucifixion and the
+Passion, on the wall of the screen, contains several hundred figures
+arranged in lines in most archaic fashion. At first sight the work
+appears as a mere mass of figures without any central point in the
+composition, and with very little relief for the eye of the spectator
+who may come to the church surfeited with the bewildering riches of
+many Italian galleries. But for those who will take the trouble to
+study the details of this fine work there is very much to admire. In
+the scene of the picture Christ is seen on the cross surrounded by
+angels. On his right hand the penitent thief on the cross is guarded
+by an angel, while on the left the impenitent one is watched by a
+devil with a curly tail and spiked wings. Below in perfectly
+bewildering fashion are many figures that may be recognised with
+little effort--Mary Magdalen, the Madonna, Joseph of Arimathæa, Roman
+soldiers, some of the general public--a confused crowd. The whole
+picture is supported by figures of San Sebastian and St. Roque seen on
+either side of the arch. Stories from the life of Christ are depicted
+in the upper parts of the picture, all are painted with the skill of a
+great artist and the fervour of a devotee, but the arrangement is
+hopelessly confused. Luini also painted a "Last Supper" for this
+church and a "Madonna with the Infant Christ and St. John." This is
+signed "Bernardino Luini, anno 1530." From 1530 until 1533 the career
+of the artist cannot be traced, but in 1533 he was in Lugano again,
+and after that year he passes altogether from our sight. Stray writers
+mention his name, some venture to carry the date of his life into the
+'forties, but we have no proof save their word, no work to record the
+later years, and all our conjecture is vain. It must suffice for us
+that Luini's life as far as his art was concerned ends for us with the
+year 1533. If he lived and worked after that date the facts relating
+to the following years and the work done in the latter days are left
+for future students to discover. It is well to remember that the
+Saronno portrait makes the painter look much older than he is supposed
+to have been.
+
+To his contemporaries it is clear that Luini was a man of small
+importance. His best work is seen outside the radius of the great Art
+centres of Italy, and it was only when he attracted the attention of
+great critics and sound judges like Morelli, John Ruskin, and John
+Addington Symonds that the lovers of beautiful pictures began to go
+out of their way to find his best work in the little towns whose
+churchmen were his patrons. So many of the lesser men had all his
+faults--that is to say, lack of perspective and inability to compose a
+big picture--that he was classed with them by those critics whose
+special gift lies in the discovery of faults. The qualities that make
+the most enduring appeal to us to-day were those that were least
+likely to make a strong impression upon the strenuous age of physical
+force in which he lived. When great conquerors and men who had
+accomplished all that force could achieve felt themselves at liberty
+to turn to prolonged consideration of the other sides of life they
+employed other masters. Then as now there were fashions in painters.
+The men for whom Luini strove were of comparatively small importance.
+A conqueror could have gathered up in the hollow of his hand all the
+cities, Milan excepted, in which Luini worked throughout his
+well-spent life, and in the stress and strife of the later years when
+great pictures did change hands from time to time by conquest, Luini's
+panel pictures in the little cities of his labours passed quite
+unnoticed, while even if the frescoes were admired it was not easy to
+move them. When at last his undoubted merits began to attract
+attention of connoisseurs, these connoisseurs were wondering why
+Leonardo da Vinci had left such a small number of pictures. They
+found work that bore a great resemblance to Leonardo and they promptly
+claimed that they had discovered the lost masterpieces. Consequently
+Leonardo received the credit that was due to the man who may have
+worked in his Milanese school and was undoubtedly under his influence
+for a time. And many of the beautiful panel pictures that show Luini
+at his best were attributed to Leonardo until nineteenth-century
+criticism proved competent enough to render praise where it was due,
+and to say definitely and with firm conviction that the unknown
+painter from Luino, who lived sometime between 1470 and 1540, was the
+true author.
+
+If, in dealing with the life of Bernardino Luini, we are forced to
+content ourselves with meagre scraps of biography and little details
+that would have no importance at all in dealing with a life that was
+traceable from early days to its conclusion, it is well to remember
+that the most important part of the great artist is his work.
+Beethoven's nine symphonies, Milton's "Paradise Lost," the landscapes
+of Corot, the portraits of Velazquez, and the carving of Grinling
+Gibbons are not more precious to us because we know something of the
+life of the men who did the work. Nor are the "Iliad" and the
+fragments that remain of the works of the great Greek sculptors less
+to us because a shadowy tradition is all that surrounds the lives of
+the men who gave immortal work to the world. We must remember that it
+is as difficult to deal with art in terms of literature as it is to
+express the subtle charm of music in words. Had Luini's years boasted
+or regretted a series of gossiping newspapers we should have gathered
+a rich harvest of fact, but the facts would have left the painter
+where he is. There is enough of Luini left in Milan and the smaller
+places we have named to tell us what the man was and the spirit in
+which he worked, and while we will welcome the new-comer who can add
+to our scanty store of authenticated facts we can hardly expect that
+they will deepen our admiration of work that for all its shortcomings
+must be remembered when we turn to ponder the greatest achievements of
+Italian Art. It forms "a magic speculum, much gone to rust, indeed,
+yet in fragments still clear; wherein the marvellous image of his
+existence does still shadow itself, though fitfully, and as with an
+intermittent light."
+
+
+The plates are printed by BEMROSE DALZIEL, LTD., Watford
+
+The text at the BALLANTYNE PRESS, Edinburgh
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Bernardino Luini, by James Mason
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 42163 ***