New Italian sketches Part 12

Yet the painter of this hall--whether we are to call him Lanini or another--was not a composer. Where he has not robbed the motives and the distribution of the figures from Raphael, he has nothing left but grace of detail. The intellectual feebleness of his style may be seen in many figures of women playing upon instruments of music, ranged around the walls. One girl at the organ is graceful; another with a tambourine has a sort of Ba.s.sarid beauty. But the group of Apollo, Pegasus, and a Muse upon Parna.s.sus is a failure in its meaningless frigidity, while few of these subordinate compositions show power of conception or vigor of design.

Lanini, like Sodoma, was a native of Vercelli; and though he was Ferrari's pupil, there is more in him of Luini or of Sodoma than of his master. He does not rise at any point to the height of these three great masters, but he shares some of Luini's and Sodoma's fine qualities, without having any of Ferrari's force. A visit to the mangled remnants of his frescos in S. Caterina will repay the student of art. This was once, apparently, a double church with the hall and chapel of a _confraternita_ appended to it. One portion of the building was painted with the history of the saint; and very lovely must this work have been, to judge by the fragments which have recently been rescued from whitewash, damp, and ruthless mutilation. What wonderful Lombard faces, half obliterated on the broken wall and mouldering plaster, smile upon us like drowned memories swimming up from the depths of oblivion!

Wherever three or four are grouped together, we find an exquisite little picture--an old woman and two young women in a doorway, for example, telling no story, but touching us with simple harmony of form. Nothing further is needed to render their grace intelligible. Indeed, knowing the faults of the school, we may seek some consolation by telling ourselves that these incomplete fragments yield Lanini's best. In the coved compartments of the roof, above the windows, ran a row of dancing boys; and these are still most beautifully modelled, though the pallor of recent whitewash is upon them. All the boys have blonde hair. They are naked, with scrolls or ribbons wreathed round them, adding to the airiness of their continual dance. Some of the loveliest are in a room used to stow away the lumber of the church--old boards and curtains, broken lanterns, candle-ends in tin sconces, the musty apparatus of festival adornments, and in the midst of all a battered, weather-beaten bier.

THE PIAZZA OF PIACENZA.

The great feature of Piacenza is its famous piazza--a romantically, picturesquely perfect square, surpa.s.sing the most daring attempts of the scene-painter, and realizing a poet's dreams. The s.p.a.ce is considerable, and many streets converge upon it at irregular angles. Its finest architectural feature is the antique Palace of the Commune: Gothic arcades of stone below, surmounted by a brick building with wonderfully delicate and varied terra-cotta work in the round-arched windows. Before this facade, on the marble pavement, prance the bronze equestrian statues of two Farnesi--insignificant men, exaggerated horses, flying drapery--as _barocco_ as it is possible to be in style, but so splendidly toned with verdigris, so superb in their _bravura_ att.i.tude, and so happily placed in the line of two streets lending far vistas from the square into the town beyond, that it is difficult to criticise them seriously. They form, indeed, an important element in the pictorial effect, and enhance the terra-cotta work of the facade, by the contrast of their color.

The time to see this square is in evening twilight--that wonderful hour after sunset--when the people are strolling on the pavement, polished to a mirror by the pacing of successive centuries, and when the cavalry soldiers group themselves at the angles under the lamp-posts or beneath the dimly lighted Gothic arches of the palace. This is the magical mellow hour to be sought by lovers of the picturesque in all the towns of Italy, the hour which, by its tender blendings of sallow western lights with glimmering lamps, casts the veil of half-shadow over any crudeness and restores the injuries of time; the hour when all the tints of these old buildings are intensified, etherealized, and harmonized by one pervasive glow. When I last saw Piacenza, it had been raining all day; and ere sun-down a clearing had come from the Alps, followed by fresh threatenings of thunderstorms. The air was very liquid. There was a tract of yellow sunset sky to westward, a faint new moon half swathed in mist above, and over all the north a huge towered thunder-cloud kept flashing distant lightnings. The pallid primrose of the West, forced down and reflected back from the vast bank of tempest, gave unearthly beauty to the hues of church and palace--tender half-tones of violet and russet paling into grays and yellows on what in daylight seemed but dull red brick. Even the uncompromising facade of St. Francesco helped; and the dukes were like statues of the "Gran Commendatore," waiting for Don Giovanni's invitation.

MASOLINO AT CASTIGLIONE D'OLONA.

Through the loveliest Arcadian scenery of woods and fields and rushing waters the road leads downward from Varese to Castiglione. The Collegiate Church stands on a leafy hill above the town, with fair prospect over groves and waterfalls and distant mountains. Here in the choir is a series of frescos by Masolino da Panicale, the master of Masaccio, who painted them about the year 1428. "Masolinus de Florentia pinxit" decides their authorship. The histories of the Virgin, St.

Stephen, and St. Lawrence are represented; but the injuries of time and neglect have been so great that it is difficult to judge them fairly.

All we feel for certain is that Masolino had not yet escaped from the traditional Giottesque mannerism. Only a group of Jews stoning Stephen and Lawrence before the tribunal remind us by dramatic energy of the Brancacci chapel.

The baptistery frescos, dealing with the legend of St. John, show a remarkable advance; and they are luckily in better preservation. A soldier lifting his two-handed sword to strike off the Baptist's head is a vigorous figure full of Florentine realism. Also in the Baptism in Jordan we are reminded of Masaccio by an excellent group of bathers--one man taking off his hose, another putting them on again, a third standing naked with his back turned, and a fourth shivering half-dressed with a look of curious sadness on his face. The nude has been carefully studied and well realized. The finest composition of this series is a large panel representing a double action--Salome at Herod's table begging for the Baptist's head, and then presenting it to her mother Herodias. The costumes are _quattrocento_ Florentine, exactly rendered. Salome is a graceful, slender creature; the two women who regard her offering to Herodias with mingled curiosity and horror are well conceived. The background consists of a mountain landscape in Masaccio's simple manner, a rich Renaissance villa, and an open loggia. The architecture perspective is scientifically accurate, and a frieze of boys with garlands on the villa is in the best manner of Florentine sculpture. On the mountain-side, diminished in scale, is a group of elders burying the body of St. John. These are ma.s.sed together and robed in the style of Masaccio, and have his virile dignity of form and action. Indeed, this interesting wall-painting furnishes an epitome of Florentine art, in its intentions and achievements, during the first half of the fifteenth century. The color is strong and brilliant, and the execution solid.

The margin of the Salome panel has been used for scratching the chronicle of Castiglione. I read one date, 1568, several of the next century, the record of a duel between two gentlemen, and many inscriptions to this effect "Erodiana Regina," "Omnia praetereunt," etc.

A dirty, one-eyed fellow keeps the place. In my presence he swept the frescos over with a scratchy broom, flaying their upper surface in profound unconsciousness of mischief. The armor of the executioner has had its steel colors almost rubbed off by this infernal process. Damp and cobwebs are far kinder.

THE CERTOSA.

The Certosa of Pavia leaves upon the mind an impression of bewildering sumptuousness: nowhere else are costly materials so combined with a lavish expenditure of the rarest art. Those who have only once been driven round together with the crew of sight-seers can carry little away but the memory of lapis-lazuli and bronze-work, inlaid agates and labyrinthine sculpture, cloisters tenantless in silence, fair painted faces smiling from dark corners on the senseless crowd, trim gardens with rows of pink primroses in spring and of begonia in autumn, blooming beneath colonnades of glowing terra-cotta. The striking contrast between the Gothic of the interior and the Renaissance facade, each in its own kind perfect, will also be remembered; and thoughts of the two great houses, Visconti and Sforza, to whose pride of power it is a monument, may be blended with the recollection of art-treasures alien to their spirit.

Two great artists, Ambrogio Borgognone and Antonio Amadeo, are the presiding genii of the Certosa. To minute criticism, based upon the accurate investigation of records and the comparison of styles, must be left the task of separating their work from that of numerous collaborators. But it is none the less certain that the keynote of the whole music is struck by them. Amadeo, the master of the Colleoni chapel at Bergamo, was both sculptor and architect. If the facade of the Certosa be not absolutely his creation, he had a hand in the distribution of its ma.s.ses and the detail of its ornaments. The only fault in this otherwise faultless product of the purest quattrocento inspiration is that the facade is a frontispiece, with hardly any structural relation to the church it masks; and this, though serious from the point of view of architecture, is no abatement of its sculpturesque and picturesque refinement. At first sight it seems a wilderness of loveliest reliefs and statues--of angel faces, fluttering raiment, flowing hair, love-laden youths, and stationary figures of grave saints, mid wayward tangles of acanthus and wild vine and cupid-laden foliage; but the subordination of these decorative details to the main design--clear, rhythmical, and lucid, like a chant of Pergolese or Stradella--will enrapture one who has the sense for unity evoked from divers elements, for thought subduing all caprices to the harmony of beauty. It is not possible elsewhere in Italy to find the instinct of the earlier Renaissance, so amorous in its expenditure of rare material, so lavish in its bestowal of the costliest workmanship on ornamental episodes, brought into truer keeping with a pure and simple structural effect.

All the great sculptor-architects of Lombardy worked in succession on this miracle of beauty; and this may account for the sustained perfection of style, which nowhere suffers from the languor of exhaustion in the artist or from repet.i.tion of motives. It remains the triumph of North Italian genius, exhibiting qualities of tenderness and self-abandonment to inspiration which we lack in the severer masterpieces of the Tuscan school.

To Borgognone is a.s.signed the painting of the roof in nave and choir--exceeding rich, varied, and withal in sympathy with stately Gothic style. Borgognone, again, is said to have designed the saints and martyrs worked in _tarsia_ for the choir-stalls. His frescos are in some parts well preserved, as in the lovely little Madonna at the end of the south chapel, while the great fresco above the window in the south transept has an historical value that renders it interesting in spite of partial decay. Borgognone's oil-pictures throughout the church prove, if such proof were needed after inspection of the altar-piece in our National Gallery, that he was one of the most powerful and original painters of Italy, blending the repose of the earlier masters and their consummate workmanship with a profound sensibility to the finest shades of feeling and the rarest forms of natural beauty. He selected an exquisite type of face for his young men and women; on his old men he bestowed singular gravity and dignity. His saints are a society of strong, pure, restful, earnest souls, in whom the pa.s.sion of deepest emotion is transfigured by habitual calm. The brown and golden harmonies he loved are gained without sacrifice of l.u.s.tre: there is a self-restraint in his coloring which corresponds to the reserve of his emotion; and though a regret sometimes rises in our mind that he should have modelled the light and shade upon his faces with a brusque, unpleasing hardness, their pallor dwells within our memory as something delicately sought if not consummately attained. In a word, Borgognone was a true Lombard of the best time. The very imperfection of his flesh-painting repeats in color what the greatest Lombard sculptors sought in stone--a sharpness of relief that pa.s.ses over into angularity.

This brusqueness was the counter-poise to tenderness of feeling and intensity of fancy in these Northern artists. Of all Borgognone's pictures in the Certosa, I should select the altar-piece of St. Siro with St. Lawrence and St. Stephen and two fathers of the Church, for its fusion of this master's qualities.

The Certosa is a wilderness of lovely workmanship. From Borgognone's majesty we pa.s.s into the quiet region of Luini's Christian grace, or mark the influence of Leonardo on that rare a.s.sumption of Madonna by his pupil, Andrea Solari. Like everything touched by the Leonardesque spirit, this great picture was left unfinished; yet Northern Italy has nothing finer to show than the landscape, outspread in its immeasurable purity of calm, behind the grouped Apostles and the ascendent Mother of Heaven. The feeling of that happy region between the Alps and Lombardy, where there are many waters--_et tacitos sine labe lacus sine murmure rivos_--and where the last spurs of the mountains sink in undulations to the plain, has pa.s.sed into this azure vista, just as all Umbria is suggested in a twilight background of young Raphael or Perugino.

The portraits of the dukes of Milan and their families carry us into a very different realm of feeling. Medallions above the doors of sacristy and chancel, stately figures reared aloft beneath gigantic canopies, men and women slumbering with folded hands upon their marble biers--we read in all those sculptured forms a strange record of human restlessness resolved into the quiet of the tomb. The iniquities of Gian Galeazzo Visconti, _il gran Biscione_; the blood-thirst of Gian Maria; the dark designs of Filippo and his secret vices; Francesco Sforza's treason; Galeazzo Maria's vanities and l.u.s.ts; their tyrants' dread of thunder and the knife; their awful deaths by pestilence and the a.s.sa.s.sin's poniard; their selfishness, oppression, cruelty, and fraud; the murders of their kinsmen; their labyrinthine plots and acts of broken faith--all is tranquil now, and we can say to each what Bosola found for the d.u.c.h.ess of Malfi ere her execution:

Much you had of land and rent; Your length in clay's now competent: A long war disturbed your mind; Here your perfect peace is signed!

Some of these faces are commonplace, with _bourgeois_ cunning written on the heavy features; one is bluff, another stolid, a third bloated, a fourth stately. The sculptors have dealt fairly with all, and not one has the lineaments of utter baseness. To Cristoforo Solari's statues of Lodovico Sforza and his wife, Beatrice d'Este, the palm of excellence in art and of historical interest must be awarded. Sculpture has rarely been more dignified and true to life than here. The woman with her short cl.u.s.tering curls, the man with his strong face, are resting after that long fever which brought woe to Italy, to Europe a new age, and to the boasted minion of fortune a slow death in the prison palace of Loches.

Attired in ducal robes, they lie in state; and the sculptor has carved the lashes on their eyelids heavy with death's marmoreal sleep. He, at least, has pa.s.sed no judgment on their crimes. Let us, too, bow and leave their memories to the historian's pen, their spirits to G.o.d's mercy.

After all wanderings in this temple of art, we return to Antonio Amadeo, to his long-haired seraphs playing on the lutes of Paradise, to his angels of the Pa.s.sion with their fluttering robes and arms outspread in agony, to his saints and satyrs mingled on pilasters of the marble doorways, his delicate _Lavabo_ decorations, and his hymns of piety expressed in n.o.ble forms of weeping women and dead Christs. Wherever we may pa.s.s, this master-spirit of the Lombard style enthralls attention.

His curious treatment of drapery, as though it were made of crumpled paper, and his trick of enhancing relief by sharp angles and attenuated limbs, do not detract from his peculiar charm. That is his way, very different from Donatello's, of attaining to the maximum of life and lightness in the stubborn vehicle of stone. Nor do all the riches of the choir--those mult.i.tudes of singing angels, those Ascensions and a.s.sumptions, and innumerable ba.s.s-reliefs of gleaming marble moulded into softest wax by mastery of art--distract our eyes from the single round medallion, not larger than a common plate, inscribed by him upon the front of the high-altar. Perhaps, if one who loved Amadeo were bidden to point out his masterpiece, he would lead the way at once to this. The s.p.a.ce is small; yet it includes the whole tragedy of the Pa.s.sion. Christ is lying dead among the women on his mother's lap, and there are pitying angels in the air above. One woman lifts his arm, another makes her breast a pillow for his head. Their agony is hushed, but felt in every limb and feature; and the extremity of suffering is seen in each articulation of the worn and wounded form just taken from the cross. It would be too painful, were not the harmony of art so rare, the interlacing of those many figures in a simple round so exquisite.

The n.o.blest tranquillity and the most pa.s.sionate emotion are here fused in a manner of adorable naturalness.

From the church it is delightful to escape into the cloisters, flooded with sunlight, where the swallows skim and the brown hawks circle and the mason-bees are at work upon their cells among the carvings. The arcades of the two cloisters are the final triumph of Lombard terra-cotta. The memory fails before such infinite invention, such facility and felicity of execution. Wreaths of cupids gliding round the arches among grape-bunches and bird-haunted foliage of vine; rows of angels, like rising and setting planets, some smiling and some grave, ascending and descending by the Gothic curves; saints stationary on their pedestals and faces leaning from the rounds above; crowds of cherubs and courses of stars and acanthus-leaves in woven lines and ribbons incessantly inscribed with Ave Maria! Then, over all, the rich red light and purple shadows of the brick, than which no substance sympathizes more completely with the sky of solid blue above, the broad plain s.p.a.ce of waving summer gra.s.s beneath our feet.

It is now late afternoon, and when evening comes the train will take us back to Milan. There is yet a little while to rest tired eyes and strained spirits among the willows and the poplars by the monastery wall. Through that gray-green leaf.a.ge, young with early spring, the pinnacles of the Certosa leap like flames into the sky. The rice-fields are under water, far and wide, shining like burnished gold beneath the level light now near to sun-down. Frogs are croaking; those persistent frogs whom the muses have ordained to sing for aye, in spite of Bion and all tuneful poets dead. We sit and watch the water-snakes, the busy rats, the hundred creatures swarming in the fat, well-watered soil.

Nightingales here and there, new-comers, tune their timid April song.

But, strangest of all sounds in such a place, my comrade from the Grisons jodels forth an Alpine cowherd's melody--_Auf den Alpen droben ist ein herrliches Leben!_

Did the echoes of Gian Galeazzo's convent ever wake to such a tune as this before?

SAN MAURIZIO.

The student of art in Italy, after mastering the characters of different styles and epochs, finds a final satisfaction in the contemplation of buildings designed and decorated by one master, or by groups of artists interpreting the spirit of a single period. Such supreme monuments of the national genius are not very common, and they are therefore the more precious. Giotto's chapel at Padua; the Villa Farnesina at Rome, built by Peruzzi and painted in fres...o...b.. Raphael and Sodoma; the Palazzo del Te at Mantua, Giulio Romano's masterpiece; the Scuola di San Rocco, ill.u.s.trating the Venetian Renaissance at its climax, might be cited among the most splendid of these achievements. In the church of the Monastero Maggiore at Milan, dedicated to San Maurizio, Lombard architecture and fresco-painting may be studied in this rare combination. The monastery itself, one of the oldest in Milan, formed a retreat for cloistered virgins following the rule of St. Benedict. It may have been founded as early as the tenth century; but its church was rebuilt in the first two decades of the sixteenth, between 1503 and 1519, and was immediately afterwards decorated with frescos by Luini and his pupils. Gian Giacomo Dolcebono, architect and sculptor, called by his fellow-craftsmen _magistro di taliare pietre_, gave the design, at once simple and harmonious, which was carried out with hardly any deviation from his plan. The church is a long parallelogram, divided into two unequal portions, the first and smaller for the public, the second for the nuns. The walls are pierced with rounded and pilastered windows, ten on each side, four of which belong to the outer and six to the inner section. The dividing wall or septum rises to the point from which the groinings of the roof spring; and round three sides of the whole building, north, east, and south, runs a gallery for the use of the convent. The altars of the inner and outer church are placed against the septum, back to back, with certain differences of structure that need not be described. Simple and severe, San Maurizio owes its architectural beauty wholly and entirely to purity of line and perfection of proportion. There is a prevailing spirit of repose, a sense of s.p.a.ce, fair, lightsome, and adapted to serene moods of the meditative fancy in this building which is singularly at variance with the religious mysticism and imaginative grandeur of a Gothic edifice.

The princ.i.p.al beauty of the church, however, is its tone of color. Every square inch is covered with fresco or rich wood-work mellowed by time into that harmony of tints which blends the work of greater and lesser artists in one golden hue of brown. Round the arcades of the convent-loggia run delicate arabesques with faces of fair female saints--Catherine, Agnes, Lucy, Agatha--gem-like or star-like, gazing from their gallery upon the church below. The Luinesque smile is on their lips and in their eyes, quiet, refined, as though the emblems of their martyrdom brought back no thought of pain to break the Paradise of rest in which they dwell. There are twenty-six in all--a sisterhood of stainless souls, the lilies of Love's garden planted round Christ's throne. Soldier saints are mingled with them in still smaller rounds above the windows, chosen to ill.u.s.trate the virtues of an order which renounced the world. To decide whose hand produced these masterpieces of Lombard suavity and grace, or whether more than one, would not be easy.

Near the altar we can perhaps trace the style of Bartolommeo Suardi in an Annunciation painted on the spandrils--that heroic style, large and n.o.ble, known to us by the chivalrous St. Martin and the glorified Madonna of the Brera frescos. It is not impossible that the male saints of the loggia may be also his, though a tenderer touch, a something more nearly Leonardesque in its quietude, must be discerned in Lucy and her sisters. The whole of the altar in this inner church belongs to Luini.

Were it not for darkness and decay, we should p.r.o.nounce this series of the Pa.s.sion in nine great compositions, with saints and martyrs and torch-bearing genii, to be one of his most ambitious and successful efforts. As it is, we can but judge in part; the adolescent beauty of Sebastian, the grave compa.s.sion of St. Rocco, the cla.s.sical perfection of the cupid with lighted tapers, the gracious majesty of women smiling on us sideways from their Lombard eyelids--these remain to haunt our memory, emerging from the shadows of the vault above.

The inner church, as is fitting, excludes all worldly elements. We are in the presence of Christ's agony, relieved and tempered by the sunlight of those beauteous female faces. All is solemn here, still as the convent, pure as the meditations of a novice. We pa.s.s the septum, and find ourselves in the outer church appropriated to the laity. Above the high-altar the whole wall is covered with Luini's loveliest work, in excellent light and far from ill preserved. The s.p.a.ce divides into eight compartments. A Pieta, an a.s.sumption, Saints and Founders of the church, group themselves under the influence of Luini's harmonizing color into one symphonious whole. But the places of distinction are reserved for two great benefactors of the convent, Alessandro de' Bentivogli and his wife, Ippolita Sforza. When the Bentivogli were expelled from Bologna by the papal forces, Alessandro settled at Milan, where he dwelt, honored by the Sforzas and allied to them by marriage, till his death in 1532.

He was buried in the monastery by the side of his sister Alessandra, a nun of the order. Luini has painted the ill.u.s.trious exile in his habit as he lived. He is kneeling, as though in ever-during adoration of the altar mystery, attired in a long black senatorial robe trimmed with furs. In his left hand he holds a book; and above his pale, serenely n.o.ble face is a little black berretta. Saints attend him, as though attesting to his act of faith. Opposite kneels Ippolita, his wife, the brilliant queen of fashion, the witty leader of society, to whom Bandello dedicated his Novelle, and whom he praised as both incomparably beautiful and singularly learned. Her queenly form is clothed from head to foot in white brocade, slashed and trimmed with gold lace, and on her forehead is a golden circlet. She has the proud port of a princess, the beauty of a woman past her prime, but stately, the indescribable dignity of att.i.tude which no one but Luini could have rendered so majestically sweet. In her hand is a book; and she, like Alessandro, has her saintly sponsors, Agnes and Catherine and St. Scolastica.

Few pictures bring the splendid Milanese court so vividly before us as these portraits of the Bentivogli: they are, moreover, very precious for the light they throw on what Luini could achieve in the secular style so rarely touched by him. Great, however, as are these frescos, they are far surpa.s.sed both in value and interest by his paintings in the side chapel of St. Catherine. Here more than anywhere else, more even than at Saronno or Lugano, do we feel the true distinction of Luini--his unrivalled excellence as a colourist, his power over pathos, the refinement of his feeling, and the peculiar beauty of his favorite types. The chapel was decorated at the expense of a Milanese advocate, Frances...o...b..sozzi, who died in 1529. It is he who is kneeling, gray-haired and bare-headed, under the protection of St. Catherine of Alexandria, intently gazing at Christ unbound from the scourging-pillar.

On the other side stand St. Lawrence and St. Stephen, pointing to the Christ and looking at us, as though their lips were framed to say: "Behold and see if there be any sorrow like unto his sorrow." Even the soldiers who have done their cruel work seem softened. They untie the cords tenderly, and support the fainting form, too weak to stand alone.

What sadness in the lovely faces of Sts. Catherine and Lawrence! What divine anguish in the loosened limbs and bending body of Christ; what piety in the adoring old man! All the moods proper to this supreme tragedy of the faith are touched as in some tenor song with low accompaniment of viols; for it was Luini's special province to feel profoundly and to express musically. The very depth of the Pa.s.sion is there; and yet there is no discord.

Just in proportion to this unique faculty for yielding a melodious representation of the most intense moments of stationary emotion was his inability to deal with a dramatic subject. The first episode of St.

Catherine's execution, when the wheel was broken and the executioners struck by lightning, is painted in this chapel without energy and with a lack of composition that betrays the master's indifference to his subject. Far different is the second episode when Catherine is about to be beheaded. The executioner has raised his sword to strike. She, robed in brocade of black and gold, so cut as to display the curve of neck and back, while the bosom is covered, leans her head above her praying hands, and waits the blow in sweetest resignation. Two soldiers stand at some distance in a landscape of hill and meadow; and far up are seen the angels carrying her body to its tomb upon Mount Sinai. I cannot find words or summon courage to describe the beauty of this picture--its atmosphere of holy peace, the dignity of its composition, the golden richness of its coloring. The most tragic situation has here again been alchemized by Luini's magic into a pure idyl, without the loss of power, without the sacrifice of edification.

St. Catherine, in this incomparable fresco, is a portrait, the history of which so strikingly ill.u.s.trates the relation of the arts to religion on the one hand, and to life on the other, in the age of the Renaissance, that it cannot be omitted. At the end of his fourth Novella, having related the life of the Contessa di Cellant, Bandello says: "And so the poor woman was beheaded; such was the end of her unbridled desires; and he who would fain see her painted to the life, let him go to the Church of the Monastero Maggiore, and there will he behold her portrait." The Contessa di Cellant was the only child of a rich usurer who lived at Casal Monferrato. Her mother was a Greek; and she was a girl of such exquisite beauty that, in spite of her low origin, she became the wife of the n.o.ble Ermes Visconti in her sixteenth year. He took her to live with him at Milan, where she frequented the house of the Bentivogli, but none other. Her husband told Bandello that he knew her temper better than to let her visit with the freedom of the Milanese ladies. Upon his death, while she was little more than twenty, she retired to Casale and led a gay life among many lovers. One of these, the Count of Cellant in the Val d'Aosta, became her second husband, conquered by her extraordinary loveliness. They could not, however, agree together. She left him, and established herself at Pavia.

Rich with her father's wealth and still of most seductive beauty, she now abandoned herself to a life of profligacy. Three among her lovers must be named: Ardizzino Valperga, Count of Masino; Roberto Sanseverino, of the princely Naples family; and Don Pietro di Cardona, a Sicilian.

With each of the two first she quarrelled, and separately besought each to murder the other. They were friends, and frustrated her plans by communicating them to one another. The third loved her with the insane pa.s.sion of a very young man. What she desired, he promised to do blindly; and she bade him murder his two predecessors in her favor. At this time she was living at Milan, where the Duke of Bourbon was acting as viceroy for the emperor. Don Pietro took twenty-five armed men of his household and waylaid the Count of Masino as he was returning, with his brother and eight or nine servants, late one night from supper. Both the brothers and the greater part of their suite were killed; but Don Pietro was caught. He revealed the atrocity of his mistress; and she was sent to prison. Incapable of proving her innocence, and prevented from escaping, in spite of fifteen thousand golden crowns with which she hoped to bribe her jailers, she was finally beheaded. Thus did a vulgar and infamous Messalina, distinguished only by rare beauty, furnish Luini with a St. Catherine for this masterpiece of pious art! The thing seems scarcely credible. Yet Bandello lived in Milan while the Church of St.

Maurizio was being painted; nor does he show the slightest sign of disgust at the discord between the Contessa's life and her artistic presentation in the person of a royal martyr.

A HUMANIST'S MONUMENT.

In the Sculpture Gallery of the Brera is preserved a fair white marble tomb, carved by that excellent Lombard sculptor Agostino Busti. The epitaph runs as follows:

En Virtutem Mortis nesciam.

Vivet Lancinus Curtius Saecula per omnia Quascunque l.u.s.trans oras, Tantum possunt Camoenae.

"Look here on Virtue that knows naught of Death! Lancinus Curtius shall live through all the centuries, and visit every sh.o.r.e on earth. Such power have the Muses." The time-worn poet reclines, as though sleeping or resting, ready to be waked; his head is covered with flowing hair, and crowned with laurel; it leans upon his left hand. On either side of his couch stand cupids or genii with torches turned to earth. Above is a group of the three Graces, flanked by winged Pegasi. Higher up are throned two Victories with palms, and at the top a naked Fame. We need not ask who was Lancinus Curtius. He is forgotten, and his virtue has not saved him from oblivion; though he strove in his lifetime, _pro virili parte_, for the palm that Busti carved upon his grave. Yet his monument teaches in short compa.s.s a deep lesson; and his epitaph sums up the dream which lured the men of Italy in the Renaissance to their doom.

We see before us sculptured in this marble the ideal of the humanistic poet-scholar's life: Love, Grace, the Muse, and Nakedness, and Glory.

There is not a single intrusive thought derived from Christianity. The end for which the man lived was pagan. His hope was earthly fame. Yet his name survives, if this indeed be a survival, not in those winged verses which were to carry him abroad across the earth, but in the marble of a cunning craftsman, scanned now and then by a wandering scholar's eye in the half-darkness of a vault.

THE MONUMENT OF GASTON DE FOIX IN THE BRERA.

The hero of Ravenna lies stretched upon his back in the hollow of a bier covered with laced drapery; and his head rests on richly ornamented cushions. These decorative accessories, together with the minute work of his scabbard, wrought in the fanciful mannerism of the _cinquecento_, serve to enhance the statuesque simplicity of the young soldier's effigy. The contrast between so much of richness in the merely subordinate details and this sublime severity of treatment in the person of the hero is truly and touchingly dramatic. There is a smile, as of content in death, upon his face; and the features are exceedingly beautiful--with the beauty of a boy, almost of a woman. The heavy hair cut straight above the forehead and straight over the shoulders, falling in ma.s.sive cl.u.s.ters. A delicately sculptured laurel-branch is woven into a victor's crown and laid lightly on the tresses it scarcely seems to clasp. So fragile is this wreath that it does not break the pure outline of the boy-conqueror's head. The armor is quite plain. So is the surcoat. Upon the swelling bust, that seems fit harbor for a hero's heart, there lies the collar of an order composed of c.o.c.kle-sh.e.l.ls; and this is all the ornament given to the figure. The hands are clasped across a sword laid flat upon the breast, and placed between the legs.

Upon the chin is a little tuft of hair, parted, and curling either way; for the victor of Ravenna like the Hermes of Homer, was +proton hypenetes+, "a youth of princely blood, whose beard hath just begun to grow, for whom the season of bloom is in its prime of grace." The whole statue is the idealization of _virtu_--that quality so highly prized by the Italians and the ancients, so well fitted for commemoration in the arts. It is the apotheosis of human life resolved into undying memory because of one great deed. It is the supreme portrait in modern times of a young hero, chiselled by artists belonging to a race no longer heroic, but capable of comprehending and expressing the aesthetic charm of heroism. Standing before it, we may say of Gaston what Arrian wrote to Hadrian of Achilles: "That he was a hero, if hero ever lived, I cannot doubt; for his birth and blood were n.o.ble, and he was beautiful, and his spirit was mighty, and he pa.s.sed in youth's prime away from men."

Italian sculpture, under the condition of the _cinquecento_, had indeed no more congenial theme than this of bravery and beauty, youth and fame, immortal honor and untimely death; nor could any sculptor of death have poetized the theme more thoroughly than Agostino Busti, whose simple instinct, unlike that of Michael Angelo, led him to subordinate his own imagination to the pathos of reality.