It remained for his disciples, each in his own sphere, with inferior powers and feebler intellect, to perpetuate the genius of their master.  Thus the spirit of Lionardo continued to live in Lombardy after he was dead.  There alone imitation was really fruitful, because it did not imply mere copying.  Instead of attempting to give a fresh and therefore a strained turn to motives that had already received consummate treatment, Lionardo’s successors were able to execute what he had planned but had not carried to completion.  Nor was the prestige of his style so oppressive through the mass of pictures painted by his hand as to check individuality or to prevent the pupil from working out such portions of the master’s vein as suited his own talent.  Each found enough suggested, but not used, to give his special faculty free scope.  This is in fact the reason why the majority of pictures ascribed to Lionardo are really the production of his school.  They have the excellence of original work, but not such excellence as Lionardo could have given them.  Their completion is due, as searching criticism proves, to lesser men; but the conception belongs to the greatest.

Andrea Salaino, Marco d’Oggiono, Francesco Melzi, Giovanni Antonio Beltraffio, and Cesare da Sesto, are all of them skilled workmen, losing and finding their individuality, as just described, in the manner of their master.  Salaino brings exquisite delicacy of execution; d’Oggiono, wild and bizarre beauty; Melzi, the refinements of a miniaturist; Beltraffio, hard brilliancy of light and colour; Cesare da Sesto, somewhat of effeminate sweetness; and thus the qualities of many men emerge, to blend themselves again in what is Lionardo’s own.  It is surely not without significance that this metempsychosis of genius should have happened in the case of Lionardo, himself the magician of Renaissance art, the lover of all things double-natured and twin-souled.

Two painters of the Lombard school, Bernardino Luini and Gaudenzio Ferrari, demand separate notice.  Without Lionardo it is difficult to say what Luini would have been:  so thoroughly did he appropriate his teacher’s type of face, and, in oil-painting, his refinement.  And yet Luini stands on his own ground, in no sense an imitator, with a genius more simple and idyllic than Da Vinci’s.  Little conception of his charm can be formed by those who have not seen his frescoes in the Brera and S. Maurizio Maggiore at Milan, in the church of the Angeli at Lugano, or in the pilgrimage church of Saronno.  To the circumstance of his having done his best work in places hardly visited until of late years, may in part perhaps be attributed the tardy recognition of a painter eminently fitted to be popular.  Luini was essentially a fresco-painter.  None, perhaps, of all the greatest Italian frescanti realised a higher quality of brilliancy without gaudiness, by the scale of colours he selected and by the purity with which he used them in simple combinations.