Leonardo da Vinci died a few months before Raphael.  Several of his pupils were artists of ability, and lived to carry on his traditions of painting in the north of Italy.  Leonardo himself had been so erratic, produced so little, and so few of his pictures survive, that many know him best in his pupils’ work, or through copies and engravings of his great ’Last Supper’—­a picture that became an almost total wreck upon the walls of the Refectory in Milan, for which it was painted.  His influence upon his contemporaries at Milan was very great, so that during some years hardly a picture was painted there which did not show a likeness to the work of Leonardo.  He had created a type of female beauty all his own.  The face will impress itself upon your memory the first time you see it, whether in a picture by Leonardo or in one by a pupil.  You can see it in the National Gallery in the great ’Madonna of the Rocks,’ and in the magnificent drawing at Burlington House.  It is not a very beautiful face, but it haunts the memory, and the Milanese artists of Leonardo’s day never threw off their recollection of it.

With far less power than Leonardo, one of his imitators, Bernardino Luini, painted pictures of such charm and simplicity that almost everyone finds them delightful.  If you could see his picture of the angels bearing St. Catherine, robed in red, through the air to her last resting-place upon the hill, you would feel the beauty and peace of his gentle nature revealed in his art.  But the spell of Leonardo vanished with the death of those who had known him in life.  The last of his pupils died in 1550, and with him the Leonardo school of painting came to an end.

There is one more painter belonging to the full Renaissance too famous to remain entirely unmentioned.  This is Correggio, a painter affected also by the pictures of Raphael and Leonardo, but individual in his vision and his work.  He passed his life in Parma, in the north of Italy, inheriting a North Italian tradition, and hearing only echoes of the world beyond.  His canvases are thronged with fair shapes, pretty women and dancing children, ethereally soft and lovely.  But it is in his native town that the angels soar aloft with the Virgin in the dome of the cathedral, and the children frolic on the walls of the convent.  These are his masterpieces you would like best.

In 1550 the impetus given to painting in Italy by the Renaissance was drawing to an end.  The great central epoch may be said to have terminated in Tuscany a few years after the deaths of Leonardo and Raphael in 1520.  But we have said nothing yet of Venice, where, in 1520, artists whose visions and whose record of them were to be as wonderful as those of Botticelli and Raphael, were as yet sleeping in their cradles.

CHAPTER VII

THE RENAISSANCE IN VENICE

A visit to Venice is one of the joys which perhaps few of us have yet experienced.  But whether we have been there or not, we all know that the very sound of her name is enchanting for those who are fresh from her magic—­her sunrises and sunsets unmatched for colour, and her streets for silence.