His frescoes are never dull or heavy in tone, never glaring, never thin or chalky.  He knew how to render them both luminous and rich, without falling into the extremes that render fresco-paintings often less attractive than oil-pictures.  His feeling for loveliness of form was original and exquisite.  The joy of youth found in Luini an interpreter only less powerful and even more tender than in Raphael.  While he shared with the Venetians their sensibility to nature, he had none of their sensuousness or love of pomp.  In idyllic painting of a truly great type I know of nothing more delightful than his figures of young musicians going to the marriage feast of Mary, nothing more graceful than the genius ivy-crowned and seated at the foot of the cross.[389] The sentiment for naive and artless grace, so fully possessed by Luini, gave freshness to his treatment of conventional religious themes.  Under his touch they appeal immediately to the most untutored taste, without the aid of realistic or sensational effects.  Even S. Sebastian and S. Rocco, whom it is difficult to represent with any novelty of attitude or expression, became for him the motives of fresh poetry, unsought but truly felt.[390] Among all the Madonnas ever painted his picture of Mary with the espalier of white roses, and another where she holds the infant Christ to pluck a purple columbine, distinguish themselves by this engaging spontaneity.  The frescoes of the marriage of the Virgin and of S. Catherine carried by angels to Mount Sinai might be cited for the same quality of freshness and unstudied poetry.[391]

When the subject demanded the exercise of grave emotion, Luini rose to the occasion without losing his simplicity.  The “Martyrdom of S. Catherine” and the fresco of Christ after the Flagellation are two masterpieces, wherein the depths of pathos have been sounded, and not a single note of discord is struck.[392] All harsh and disagreeable details are either eliminated, or so softened that the general impression, as in Pergolese’s music, is one of profoundest and yet sweetest sorrow.  Luini’s genius was not tragic.  The nearest approach to a dramatic motive in his work is the figure of the Magdalen kneeling before the cross, with her long yellow hair streaming over her shoulders, and her arms thrown backwards in an ecstasy of grief.[393] He did well to choose moments that stir tender sympathy—­the piety of deep and calm devotion.  How truly he felt them—­more truly, I think, than Perugino in his best period—­is proved by the correspondence they awake in us.  Like melodies, they create a mood in the spectator.

What Luini did not learn from Lionardo, was the art of composition.  Taken one by one, the figures that make up his “Marriage of the Virgin” at Saronno, are beautiful; but the whole picture is clumsily constructed; and what is true of this, may be said of every painting in which he attempted complicated grouping.[394] We feel him to be a great artist only where the subject does not demand the symmetrical arrangement of many parts.