Suetonius asserts that he was hideously ugly.  How are we to square this testimony with the witness of the bronze before us?  What changed the face, so beautiful and terrible in youth, to ugliness that shrank from sight in manhood?  Did the murderers find it blurred in its fine lineaments, furrowed with lines of care, hollowed with the soul’s hunger?  Unless a life of vice and madness had succeeded in making Caligula’s face what the faces of some maniacs are—­the bloated ruin of what was once a living witness to the soul within—­I could fancy that death may have sanctified it with even more beauty than this bust of the self-tormented young man shows.  Have we not all seen the anguish of thought-fretted faces smoothed out by the hands of the Deliverer?

FERRARI AT VERCELLI

It is possible that many visitors to the Cathedral of Como have carried away the memory of stately women with abundant yellow hair and draperies of green and crimson, in a picture they connect thereafter with Gaudenzio Ferrari.  And when they come to Milan, they are probably both impressed and disappointed by a Martyrdom of S. Catherine in the Brera, bearing the same artist’s name.  If they wish to understand this painter, they must seek him at Varallo, at Saronno, and at Vercelli.  In the Church of S. Cristoforo in Vercelli, Gaudenzio Ferrari at the full height of his powers showed what he could do to justify Lomazzo’s title chosen for him of the Eagle.  He has indeed the strong wing and the swiftness of the king of birds.  And yet the works of few really great painters—­and among the really great we place Ferrari—­leave upon the mind a more distressing sense of imperfection.  Extraordinary fertility of fancy, vehement dramatic passion, sincere study of nature, and great command of technical resources are here (as elsewhere in Ferrari’s frescoes) neutralised by an incurable defect of the combining and harmonising faculty, so essential to a masterpiece.  There is stuff enough of thought and vigour and imagination to make a dozen artists.  And yet we turn away disappointed from the crowded, dazzling, stupefying wilderness of forms and faces on these mighty walls.

All that Ferrari derived from actual life—­the heads of single figures, the powerful movement of men and women in excited action, the monumental pose of two praying nuns—­is admirably rendered.  His angels too, in S. Cristoforo as elsewhere, are quite original; not only in their type of beauty, which is terrestrial and peculiar to Ferrari, without a touch of Correggio’s sensuality; but also in the intensity of their emotion, the realisation of their vitality.  Those which hover round the Cross in the fresco of the ‘Crucifixion’ are as passionate as any angels of the Giottesque masters in Assisi.  Those again which crowd the Stable of Bethlehem in the ‘Nativity’ yield no point of idyllic charm to Gozzoli’s in the Riccardi Chapel.