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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.
  VIGEE 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. Salome 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 _reclame_ 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