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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
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.--SALOME 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