Passing into the choir, we find on either hand the ’Adoration of the Magi’ and the ‘Purification of the Virgin,’ two of Luini’s divinest frescoes.  Above them in lunettes are four Evangelists and four Latin Fathers, with four Sibyls.  Time and neglect have done no damage here:  and here, again, perforce we notice perfect mastery of colour in fresco.  The blues detach themselves too much, perhaps, from the rest of the colouring; and that is all a devil’s advocate could say.  It is possible that the absence of blue makes the S. Catherine frescoes in the Monastero Maggiore at Milan surpass all other works of Luini.  But nowhere else has he shown more beauty and variety in detail than here.  The group of women led by Joseph, the shepherd carrying the lamb upon his shoulder, the girl with a basket of white doves, the child with an apple on the altar-steps, the lovely youth in the foreground heedless of the scene; all these are idyllic incidents treated with the purest, the serenest, the most spontaneous, the truest, most instinctive sense of beauty.  The landscape includes a view of Saronno, and an episodical picture of the ‘Flight into Egypt’ where a white-robed angel leads the way.  All these lovely things are in the ‘Purification,’ which is dated Bernardinus Lovinus pinxit, MDXXV.

The fresco of the ‘Magi’ is less notable in detail, and in general effect is more spoiled by obtrusive blues.  There is, however, one young man of wholly Lionardesque loveliness, whose divine innocence of adolescence, unalloyed by serious thought, unstirred by passions, almost forces a comparison with Sodoma.  The only painter who approaches Luini in what may be called the Lombard, to distinguish it from the Venetian idyll, is Sodoma; and the work of his which comes nearest to Luini’s masterpieces is the legend of S. Benedict, at Monte Oliveto, near Siena.  Yet Sodoma had not all Luini’s innocence or naivete. If he added something slightly humorous which has an indefinite charm, he lacked that freshness as of ’cool, meek-blooded flowers’ and boyish voices, which fascinates us in Luini.  Sodoma was closer to the earth, and feared not to impregnate what he saw of beauty with the fiercer passions of his nature.  If Luini had felt passion, who shall say?  It appears nowhere in his work, where life is toned to a religious joyousness.  When Shelley compared the poetry of the Theocritean amourists to the perfume of the tuberose, and that of the earlier Greek poets to ’a meadow-gale of June, which mingles the fragrance of all the flowers of the field,’ he supplied us with critical images which may not unfairly be used to point the distinction between Sodoma at Monte Oliveto and Luini at Saronno.

THE CASTELLO OF FERRARA

Is it possible that the patron saints of cities should mould the temper of the people to their own likeness?  S. George, the chivalrous, is champion of Ferrara.  His is the marble group above the Cathedral porch, so feudal in its medieval pomp.  He and S. Michael are painted in fresco over the south portcullis of the Castle.  His lustrous armour gleams with Giorgionesque brilliancy from Dossi’s masterpiece in the Pinacoteca.  That Ferrara, the only place in Italy where chivalry struck any root, should have had S. George for patron, is at any rate significant.