Gaudenzio Ferrari was a genius of a different order, more robust, more varied, but less single-minded than Luini.  His style reveals the influences of a many-sided, ill-assimilated education; blending the manners of Bramantino, Lionardo, and Raphael without proper fusion.  Though Ferrari travelled much, and learned his art in several schools, he, like Luini, can only be studied in the Milanese district—­at his birthplace Varallo, at Saronno, Vercelli, and Milan.  It is to be regretted that a painter of such singular ability, almost unrivalled at moments in the expression of intense feeling and the representation of energetic movement, should have lacked a simpler training, or have been unable to adopt a manner more uniform.  There is a strength of wing in his imaginative flight, a swiftness and impetuosity in his execution, and a dramatic force in his conception, that almost justify Lomazzo’s choice of the eagle for his emblem.  Yet he was unable to collect his powers, or to rule them.  The distractions of an age that had produced its masterpieces, were too strong for him; and what he failed to find was balance.  His picture of the “Martyrdom of S. Catherine,” where reminiscences of Raphael and Lionardo mingle with the uncouth motives of an earlier style in a medley without unity of composition or harmony of colouring, might be chosen as a typical instance of great resources misapplied.[395]

The most pleasing of Ferrari’s paintings are choirs of angels, sorrowing or rejoicing, some of them exquisitely and originally beautiful, all animated with unusual life, and poised upon wings powerful enough to bear them—­veritable “birds of God."[396] His dramatic scenes from sacred history, rich in novel motives and exuberantly full of invention, crowd the churches of Vercelli; while a whole epic of the Passion is painted in fresco above the altar of S. Maria delle Grazie at Varallo, covering the wall from basement to ceiling.  The prodigality of power displayed by Ferrari makes up for much of crudity in style and confusion in aim; nor can we refuse the tribute of warmest admiration to a master, who, when the schools of Rome and Florence were sinking into emptiness and bombast, preserved the fire of feeling for serious themes.  What was deadly in the neo-paganism of the Renaissance—­its frivolity and worldliness, corroding the very sources of belief in men who made of art a decoration for their sensuous existence—­had not penetrated to those Lombard valleys where Ferrari and Luini worked.  There the devotion of the Sacri Monti still maintained an intelligence between the people and the artist, far more fruitful of results to painting than the patronage of splendour-loving cardinals and nobles.[397]