roof, with a large flat oblong space in the centre of the ceiling.  The whole of this vault and the lunettes beneath were painted by Lanini; so runs the tradition of the fresco-painter’s name; and though much injured by centuries of outrage, and somewhat marred by recent restoration, these frescoes form a precious monument of Lombard art.  The object of the painter’s design seems to have been the glorification of Music.  In the central compartment of the roof is an assembly of the gods, obviously borrowed from Raphael’s ‘Marriage of Cupid and Psyche’ in the Farnesina at Rome.  The fusion of Roman composition with Lombard execution constitutes the chief charm of this singular work, and makes it, so far as I am aware, unique.  Single figures of the goddesses, and the whole movement of the scene upon Olympus, are transcribed without attempt at concealment.  And yet the fresco is not a barefaced copy.  The manner of feeling and of execution is quite different from that of Raphael’s school.  The poetry and sentiment are genuinely Lombard.  None of Raphael’s pupils could have carried out his design with a delicacy of emotion and a technical skill in colouring so consummate.  What, we think, as we gaze upward, would the Master have given for such a craftsman?  The hardness, coarseness, and animal crudity of the Roman School are absent:  so also is their vigour.  But where the grace of form and colour is so soft and sweet, where the high-bred calm of good company is so sympathetically rendered, where the atmosphere of amorous languor and of melody is so artistically diffused, we cannot miss the powerful modelling and rather vulgar tours de force of Giulio Romano.  The scale of tone is silvery golden.  There are no hard blues, no coarse red flesh-tints, no black shadows.  Mellow lights, the morning hues of primrose, or of palest amber, pervade the whole society.  It is a court of gentle and harmonious souls; and though this style of beauty might cloy, at first sight there is something ravishing in those yellow-haired white-limbed, blooming deities.  No movement of lascivious grace as in Correggio, no perturbation of the senses as in some of the Venetians, disturbs the rhythm of their music; nor is the pleasure of the flesh, though felt by the painter and communicated to the spectator, an interruption to their divine calm.  The white, saffron-haired goddesses are grouped together like stars seen in the topaz light of evening, like daffodils half smothered in snowdrops, and among them, Diana, with the crescent on her forehead, is the fairest.  Her dream-like beauty need fear no comparison with the Diana of the Camera di S. Paolo.  Apollo and Bacchus are scarcely less lovely in their bloom of earliest manhood; honey-pale, as Greeks would say; like statues of living electron; realising Simaetha’s picture of her lover and his friend: 

[Greek: 

  tois d’ en xanthotera men elichrysoio geneias,
  stethea de stilbonta poly pleon e tu Selana.[9]]