raised his sword to strike.  She, robed in brocade of black and gold, so cut as to display the curve of neck and back, while the bosom is covered, leans her head above her praying hands, and waits the blow in sweetest resignation.  Two soldiers stand at some distance in a landscape of hill and meadow; and far up are seen the angels carrying her body to its tomb upon Mount Sinai.  I cannot find words or summon courage to describe the beauty of this picture; its atmosphere of holy peace, the dignity of its composition, the golden richness of its colouring.  The most tragic situation has here again been alchemised by Luini’s magic into a pure idyll, without the loss of power, without the sacrifice of edification.

S. Catherine in this incomparable fresco is a portrait, the history of which so strikingly illustrates the relation of the arts to religion on the one hand, and to life on the other, in the age of the Renaissance, that it cannot be omitted.  At the end of his fourth Novella, having related the life of the Contessa di Cellant, Bandello says:  ’And so the poor woman was beheaded; such was the end of her unbridled desires; and he who would fain see her painted to the life, let him go to the Church of the Monistero Maggiore, and there will he behold her portrait.’  The Contessa di Cellant was the only child of a rich usurer who lived at Casal Monferrato.  Her mother was a Greek; and she was a girl of such exquisite beauty, that, in spite of her low origin, she became the wife of the noble Ermes Visconti in her sixteenth year.  He took her to live with him at Milan, where she frequented the house of the Bentivogli, but none other.  Her husband told Bandello that he knew her temper better than to let her visit with the freedom of the Milanese ladies.  Upon his death, while she was little more than twenty, she retired to Casale and led a gay life among many lovers.  One of these, the Count of Cellant in the Val d’Aosta, became her second husband, conquered by her extraordinary loveliness.  They could not, however, agree together.  She left him, and established herself at Pavia.  Rich with her father’s wealth and still of most seductive beauty, she now abandoned herself to a life of profligacy.  Three among her lovers must be named:  Ardizzino Valperga, Count of Masino; Roberto Sanseverino, of the princely Naples family; and Don Pietro di Cardona, a Sicilian.  With each of the two first she quarrelled, and separately besought each to murder the other.  They were friends and frustrated her plans by communicating them to one another.  The third loved her with the insane passion of a very young man.  What she desired, he promised to do blindly; and she bade him murder his two predecessors in her favour.  At this time she was living at Milan, where the Duke of Bourbon was acting as viceroy for the Emperor.  Don Pietro took twenty-five armed men of his household, and waylaid the Count of Masino, as he was returning with his brother and eight or nine servants, late one night from supper.