Then, in the fifteenth century, arose the glorious Church of the Madonna,
with spacious atrium after the Ambrosian manner,
a façade richly sculptured in the style of the Renaissance,
and sumptuously adorned within.
Behind the massive silver tabernacle of the altar of the miraculous picture
which gave its origin to this splendid building,
the rare visitor, peeping as into some sacred bird-nest,
detects one of the loveliest works of Luini,
a small, but exquisitely finished "Holy Family."
Among the fine pictures around are works by two other very notable
religious painters of the cinque-cento.
Both alike, Ferrari and Borgognone, may seem to have introduced into fiery Italian latitudes
a certain northern temperature, and somewhat twilight, French, or Flemish, or German, thoughts.
Ferrari, coming from the neighbourhood of Varallo, after work at Vercelli and Novara, returns thither to labour,
as both sculptor and painter, in the "stations" of the Sacro Monte,
at a form of religious art which would seem to have some natural kinship with the temper of a mountain people.
It is as if the living actors in the "Passion Play" of Oberammergau had been transformed into almost illusive groups in painted terra-cotta.
The scenes of the Last Supper, of the Martyrdom of the Innocents, of the Raising of Jairus' daughter, for instance,
are certainly touching in the naïve piety of their life-sized realism.
But Gaudenzio Ferrari had many helpmates at the Sacro Monte; and his lovelier work is in the Franciscan Church at the foot of the hill,
and in those two, truly Italian, far-off towns of the Lombard plain.
Even in his great, many-storied fresco in the Franciscan Church at Varallo there are traces of a somewhat barbaric hankering after solid form;
the armour of the Roman soldiers, for example, is raised and gilt.
It is as if this serious soul, going back to his mountain home, had lapsed again into mountain "grotesque,"
with touches also, in truth, of a peculiarly northern poetry--a mystic poetry, which now and then, in his treatment, for instance, of angel forms and faces, reminds one of Blake.
There is something of it certainly in the little white spectral soul of the penitent thief making its escape from the dishonoured body along the beam of his cross.
The contrast is a vigorous one when, in the space of a few hours, the traveller finds himself at Vercelli, half-stifled in its thick pressing crop of pumpkins and mulberry trees.
The expression of the prophet occurs to him: "A lodge in a garden of cucumbers."
Garden of cucumbers and half-tropical flowers, it has invaded the quiet open spaces of the town.
Search through them, through the almost cloistral streets, for the Church of the Umiliati;
and there, amid the soft garden-shadows of the choir, you may find the sentiment of the neighbourhood expressed with great refinement in what is perhaps the masterpiece of Ferrari, "Our Lady of the Fruit-garden," as we might say--attended by twelve life-sized saints and the monkish donors of the picture.
The remarkable proportions of the tall panel, up which the green-stuff is climbing thickly above the mitres and sacred garniture of those sacred personages, lend themselves harmoniously to the gigantic stature of Saint Christopher in the foreground as the patron saint of the church.
With the savour of this picture in his memory, the visitor will look eagerly in some half-dozen neighbouring churches and deserted conventual places for certain other works from Ferrari's hand;
and so, leaving the place under the influence of his delicate religious ideal, may seem to have been listening to much exquisite church-music there, violins and the like, on that perfectly silent afternoon--such music as he may still really hear on Sundays at the neighbouring town of Novara, famed for it from of old.
Here, again, the art of Gaudenzio Ferrari reigns.
Gaudenzio!
It is the name of the saintly prelate on whom his pencil was many times employed, First Bishop of Novara, and patron of the magnificent basilica hard by which still covers his body, whose earthly presence in cope and mitre Ferrari has commemorated in the altar-piece of the "Marriage of St. Catherine," with its refined richness of colour, like a bank of real flowers blooming there,
and like nothing else around it in the vast duomo of old Roman architecture, now heavily masked in modern stucco.
The solemn mountains, under the closer shadow of which his genius put on a northern hue, are far away, telling at Novara only as the grandly theatrical background to an entirely lowland life.
And here, as at Vercelli so at Novara, Ferrari is not less graciously Italian than Luini himself.
If the name of Luini's master, Borgognone, is no proof of northern extraction, a northern temper is nevertheless a marked element of his genius--something of the patience, especially, of the masters of Dijon or Bruges, nowhere more clearly than in the two groups of male and female heads in the National Gallery, family groups, painted in the attitude of worship, with a lowly religious sincerity which may remind us of the contemporary work of M. Legros.
Like those northern masters, he accepts piously, but can refine, what "has no comeliness."
And yet perhaps no painter has so adequately presented that purely personal beauty (for which, indeed, even profane painters for the most part have seemed to care very little) as Borgognone in the two deacons, Stephen and Laurence, who, in one of the altar-pieces of the Certosa, assist at the throne of Syrus, ancient, sainted, First Bishop of Pavia--stately youths in quite imperial dalmatics of black and gold.
An indefatigable worker at many forms of religious art, here and elsewhere, assisting at last in the carving and inlaying of the rich marble façade of the Certosa, the rich carved and inlaid wood-work of Santa Maria at Bergamo, he is seen perhaps at his best, certainly in his most significantly religious mood, in the Church of the Incoronata at Lodi, especially in one picture there, the "Presentation of Christ in the Temple."
The experienced visitor knows what to expect in the sacristies of the great Italian churches; the smaller, choicer works of Luini, say, of Della Robbia or Mino of Fiesole, the superb ambries and drawers and presses of old oak or cedar, the still untouched morsel of fresco--like sacred priestly thoughts visibly lingering there in the half-light.
Well! the little octagonal Church of the Incoronata is like one of these sacristies.
The work of Bramante--you see it, as it is so rarely one's luck to do, with its furniture and internal decoration complete and unchanged, the coloured pavement, the colouring which covers the walls, the elegant little organ of Domenico da Lucca (1507), the altar-screens with their dainty rows of brass cherubs.
In Borgognone's picture of the "Presentation," there the place is, essentially as we see it to-day.
The ceremony, invested with all the sentiment of a Christian sacrament, takes place in this very church, this "Temple" of the Incoronata where you are standing, reflected on the dimly glorious wall, as in a mirror.
Borgognone in his picture has but added in long legend, letter by letter, on the fascia below the cupola, the Song of Simeon.
The Incoronata however is, after all, the monument less of Ambrogio Borgognone than of the gifted Piazza family:--Callisto, himself born at Lodi, his father, his uncle, his brothers, his son Fulvio, working there in three generations, under marked religious influence, and with so much power and grace that, quite gratuitously, portions of their work have been attributed to the master-hand of Titian, in some imaginary visit here to these painters, who were in truth the disciples of another--Romanino of Brescia.
At Lodi, the lustre of Scipione Piazza is lost in that of Callisto, his elder brother; but he might worthily be included in a list of painters memorable for a single picture, such pictures as the solemn Madonna of Pierino del Vaga, in the Duomo of Pisa, or the Holy Family of Pellegrino Piola, in the Goldsmiths' Street at Genoa.
A single picture, a single figure in a picture, signed and dated, over the altar of Saint Clement, in the Church of San Spirito, at Bergamo, might preserve the fame of Scipione Piazza, who did not live to be old.
The figure is that of the youthful Clement of Rome himself, "who had seen the blessed Apostles," writing at the dictation of Saint Paul.
For a moment he looks away from the letters of the book with all the wistful intelligence of a boy softly touched already by the radiancy of the celestial Wisdom.
"Her ways are ways of pleasantness!"
That is the lesson this winsome, docile, spotless creature--ingenui vultus puer ingenuique pudoris--younger brother or cousin of Borgognone's noble deacons at the Certosa--seems put there to teach us.
And in this church, indeed, as it happens, Scipione's work is side by side with work of his.
It is here, in fact, at Bergamo and at Brescia, that the late survival of a really convinced religious spirit becomes a striking fact in the history of Italian art.
Vercelli and Novara, though famous for their mountain neighbourhood, enjoy but a distant and occasional view of Monte Rosa and its companions; and even then those awful stairways to tracts of airy sunlight may seem hardly real.
But the beauty of the twin sub-alpine towns further eastward is shaped by the circumstance that mountain and plain meet almost in their streets, very effectively for all purposes of the picturesque.
Brescia, immediately below the "Falcon of Lombardy" (so they called its masterful fortress on the last ledge of the Piè di Monte), to which you may now ascend by gentle turfed paths, to watch the purple mystery of evening mount gradually from the great plain up the mountain-walls close at hand, is as level as a church pavement, home-like, with a kind of easy walking from point to point about it, rare in Italian towns--a town full of walled gardens, giving even to its smaller habitations the retirement of their more sumptuous neighbours, and a certain English air.
You may peep into them, pacing its broad streets, from the blaze of which you are glad to escape into the dim and sometimes gloomy churches, the twilight sacristies, rich with carved and coloured woodwork.
The art of Romanino still lights up one of the darkest of those churches with the altar-piece which is perhaps his most expressive and noblest work.
The veritable blue sky itself seems to be breaking into the dark-cornered, low-vaulted, Gothic sanctuary of the Barefoot Brethren, around the Virgin and Child, the bowed, adoring figures of Bonaventura, Saint Francis, Saint Antony, the youthful majesty of Saint Louis, to keep for ever in memory--not the King of France however, in spite of the fleurs-de-lys on his cope of azure, but Louis, Bishop of Toulouse.
A Rubens in Italy! you may think, if you care to rove from the delightful fact before you after vague supposititious alliances--something between Titian and Rubens!
Certainly, Romanino's bold, contrasted colouring anticipates something of the northern freshness of Rubens.
But while the peculiarity of the work of Rubens is a sense of momentary transition, as if the colours were even now melting in it, Romanino's canvas bears rather the steady glory of broad Italian noonday;
while he is distinguished also for a remarkable clearness of design, which has perhaps something to do, is certainly congruous with, a markedly religious sentiment, like that of Angelico or Perugino, lingering still in the soul of this Brescian painter towards the middle of the sixteenth century.
Romanino and Moretto, the two great masters of Brescia in successive generations, both alike inspired above all else by the majesty, the majestic beauty, of religion--its persons, its events, every circumstance that belongs to it--are to be seen in friendly rivalry, though with ten years' difference of age between them, in the Church of San Giovanni Evangelista;
Romanino approaching there, as near as he might, in a certain candle-lighted scene, to that harmony in black, white, and grey preferred by the younger painter.
Before this or that example of Moretto's work, in that admirably composed picture of Saint Paul's Conversion, for instance, you might think of him as but a very noble designer in grisaille.
A more detailed study would convince you that, whatever its component elements, there is a very complex tone which almost exclusively belongs to him; the "Saint Ursula" finally, that he is a great, though very peculiar colourist--a lord of colour who, while he knows the colour resources that may lie even in black and white, has really included every delicate hue whatever in that faded "silver grey," which yet lingers in one's memory as their final effect.
For some admirers indeed he is definable as a kind of really sanctified Titian.
It must be admitted, however, that whereas Titian sometimes lost a little of himself in the greatness of his designs, or committed their execution, in part, to others, Moretto, in his work, is always all there--thorough, steady, even, in his workmanship.
That, again, was a result of his late-surviving religious conscience.
And here, as in other instances, the supposed influence of the greater master is only a supposition.
As a matter of fact, at least in his earlier life, Moretto made no visit to Venice; developed his genius at home, under such conditions for development as were afforded by the example of the earlier masters of Brescia itself; left his work there abundantly, and almost there alone, as the thoroughly representative product of a charming place.
with spacious atrium after the Ambrosian manner,
a façade richly sculptured in the style of the Renaissance,
and sumptuously adorned within.
Behind the massive silver tabernacle of the altar of the miraculous picture
which gave its origin to this splendid building,
the rare visitor, peeping as into some sacred bird-nest,
detects one of the loveliest works of Luini,
a small, but exquisitely finished "Holy Family."
Among the fine pictures around are works by two other very notable
religious painters of the cinque-cento.
Both alike, Ferrari and Borgognone, may seem to have introduced into fiery Italian latitudes
a certain northern temperature, and somewhat twilight, French, or Flemish, or German, thoughts.
Ferrari, coming from the neighbourhood of Varallo, after work at Vercelli and Novara, returns thither to labour,
as both sculptor and painter, in the "stations" of the Sacro Monte,
at a form of religious art which would seem to have some natural kinship with the temper of a mountain people.
It is as if the living actors in the "Passion Play" of Oberammergau had been transformed into almost illusive groups in painted terra-cotta.
The scenes of the Last Supper, of the Martyrdom of the Innocents, of the Raising of Jairus' daughter, for instance,
are certainly touching in the naïve piety of their life-sized realism.
But Gaudenzio Ferrari had many helpmates at the Sacro Monte; and his lovelier work is in the Franciscan Church at the foot of the hill,
and in those two, truly Italian, far-off towns of the Lombard plain.
Even in his great, many-storied fresco in the Franciscan Church at Varallo there are traces of a somewhat barbaric hankering after solid form;
the armour of the Roman soldiers, for example, is raised and gilt.
It is as if this serious soul, going back to his mountain home, had lapsed again into mountain "grotesque,"
with touches also, in truth, of a peculiarly northern poetry--a mystic poetry, which now and then, in his treatment, for instance, of angel forms and faces, reminds one of Blake.
There is something of it certainly in the little white spectral soul of the penitent thief making its escape from the dishonoured body along the beam of his cross.
The contrast is a vigorous one when, in the space of a few hours, the traveller finds himself at Vercelli, half-stifled in its thick pressing crop of pumpkins and mulberry trees.
The expression of the prophet occurs to him: "A lodge in a garden of cucumbers."
Garden of cucumbers and half-tropical flowers, it has invaded the quiet open spaces of the town.
Search through them, through the almost cloistral streets, for the Church of the Umiliati;
and there, amid the soft garden-shadows of the choir, you may find the sentiment of the neighbourhood expressed with great refinement in what is perhaps the masterpiece of Ferrari, "Our Lady of the Fruit-garden," as we might say--attended by twelve life-sized saints and the monkish donors of the picture.
The remarkable proportions of the tall panel, up which the green-stuff is climbing thickly above the mitres and sacred garniture of those sacred personages, lend themselves harmoniously to the gigantic stature of Saint Christopher in the foreground as the patron saint of the church.
With the savour of this picture in his memory, the visitor will look eagerly in some half-dozen neighbouring churches and deserted conventual places for certain other works from Ferrari's hand;
and so, leaving the place under the influence of his delicate religious ideal, may seem to have been listening to much exquisite church-music there, violins and the like, on that perfectly silent afternoon--such music as he may still really hear on Sundays at the neighbouring town of Novara, famed for it from of old.
Here, again, the art of Gaudenzio Ferrari reigns.
Gaudenzio!
It is the name of the saintly prelate on whom his pencil was many times employed, First Bishop of Novara, and patron of the magnificent basilica hard by which still covers his body, whose earthly presence in cope and mitre Ferrari has commemorated in the altar-piece of the "Marriage of St. Catherine," with its refined richness of colour, like a bank of real flowers blooming there,
and like nothing else around it in the vast duomo of old Roman architecture, now heavily masked in modern stucco.
The solemn mountains, under the closer shadow of which his genius put on a northern hue, are far away, telling at Novara only as the grandly theatrical background to an entirely lowland life.
And here, as at Vercelli so at Novara, Ferrari is not less graciously Italian than Luini himself.
If the name of Luini's master, Borgognone, is no proof of northern extraction, a northern temper is nevertheless a marked element of his genius--something of the patience, especially, of the masters of Dijon or Bruges, nowhere more clearly than in the two groups of male and female heads in the National Gallery, family groups, painted in the attitude of worship, with a lowly religious sincerity which may remind us of the contemporary work of M. Legros.
Like those northern masters, he accepts piously, but can refine, what "has no comeliness."
And yet perhaps no painter has so adequately presented that purely personal beauty (for which, indeed, even profane painters for the most part have seemed to care very little) as Borgognone in the two deacons, Stephen and Laurence, who, in one of the altar-pieces of the Certosa, assist at the throne of Syrus, ancient, sainted, First Bishop of Pavia--stately youths in quite imperial dalmatics of black and gold.
An indefatigable worker at many forms of religious art, here and elsewhere, assisting at last in the carving and inlaying of the rich marble façade of the Certosa, the rich carved and inlaid wood-work of Santa Maria at Bergamo, he is seen perhaps at his best, certainly in his most significantly religious mood, in the Church of the Incoronata at Lodi, especially in one picture there, the "Presentation of Christ in the Temple."
The experienced visitor knows what to expect in the sacristies of the great Italian churches; the smaller, choicer works of Luini, say, of Della Robbia or Mino of Fiesole, the superb ambries and drawers and presses of old oak or cedar, the still untouched morsel of fresco--like sacred priestly thoughts visibly lingering there in the half-light.
Well! the little octagonal Church of the Incoronata is like one of these sacristies.
The work of Bramante--you see it, as it is so rarely one's luck to do, with its furniture and internal decoration complete and unchanged, the coloured pavement, the colouring which covers the walls, the elegant little organ of Domenico da Lucca (1507), the altar-screens with their dainty rows of brass cherubs.
In Borgognone's picture of the "Presentation," there the place is, essentially as we see it to-day.
The ceremony, invested with all the sentiment of a Christian sacrament, takes place in this very church, this "Temple" of the Incoronata where you are standing, reflected on the dimly glorious wall, as in a mirror.
Borgognone in his picture has but added in long legend, letter by letter, on the fascia below the cupola, the Song of Simeon.
The Incoronata however is, after all, the monument less of Ambrogio Borgognone than of the gifted Piazza family:--Callisto, himself born at Lodi, his father, his uncle, his brothers, his son Fulvio, working there in three generations, under marked religious influence, and with so much power and grace that, quite gratuitously, portions of their work have been attributed to the master-hand of Titian, in some imaginary visit here to these painters, who were in truth the disciples of another--Romanino of Brescia.
At Lodi, the lustre of Scipione Piazza is lost in that of Callisto, his elder brother; but he might worthily be included in a list of painters memorable for a single picture, such pictures as the solemn Madonna of Pierino del Vaga, in the Duomo of Pisa, or the Holy Family of Pellegrino Piola, in the Goldsmiths' Street at Genoa.
A single picture, a single figure in a picture, signed and dated, over the altar of Saint Clement, in the Church of San Spirito, at Bergamo, might preserve the fame of Scipione Piazza, who did not live to be old.
The figure is that of the youthful Clement of Rome himself, "who had seen the blessed Apostles," writing at the dictation of Saint Paul.
For a moment he looks away from the letters of the book with all the wistful intelligence of a boy softly touched already by the radiancy of the celestial Wisdom.
"Her ways are ways of pleasantness!"
That is the lesson this winsome, docile, spotless creature--ingenui vultus puer ingenuique pudoris--younger brother or cousin of Borgognone's noble deacons at the Certosa--seems put there to teach us.
And in this church, indeed, as it happens, Scipione's work is side by side with work of his.
It is here, in fact, at Bergamo and at Brescia, that the late survival of a really convinced religious spirit becomes a striking fact in the history of Italian art.
Vercelli and Novara, though famous for their mountain neighbourhood, enjoy but a distant and occasional view of Monte Rosa and its companions; and even then those awful stairways to tracts of airy sunlight may seem hardly real.
But the beauty of the twin sub-alpine towns further eastward is shaped by the circumstance that mountain and plain meet almost in their streets, very effectively for all purposes of the picturesque.
Brescia, immediately below the "Falcon of Lombardy" (so they called its masterful fortress on the last ledge of the Piè di Monte), to which you may now ascend by gentle turfed paths, to watch the purple mystery of evening mount gradually from the great plain up the mountain-walls close at hand, is as level as a church pavement, home-like, with a kind of easy walking from point to point about it, rare in Italian towns--a town full of walled gardens, giving even to its smaller habitations the retirement of their more sumptuous neighbours, and a certain English air.
You may peep into them, pacing its broad streets, from the blaze of which you are glad to escape into the dim and sometimes gloomy churches, the twilight sacristies, rich with carved and coloured woodwork.
The art of Romanino still lights up one of the darkest of those churches with the altar-piece which is perhaps his most expressive and noblest work.
The veritable blue sky itself seems to be breaking into the dark-cornered, low-vaulted, Gothic sanctuary of the Barefoot Brethren, around the Virgin and Child, the bowed, adoring figures of Bonaventura, Saint Francis, Saint Antony, the youthful majesty of Saint Louis, to keep for ever in memory--not the King of France however, in spite of the fleurs-de-lys on his cope of azure, but Louis, Bishop of Toulouse.
A Rubens in Italy! you may think, if you care to rove from the delightful fact before you after vague supposititious alliances--something between Titian and Rubens!
Certainly, Romanino's bold, contrasted colouring anticipates something of the northern freshness of Rubens.
But while the peculiarity of the work of Rubens is a sense of momentary transition, as if the colours were even now melting in it, Romanino's canvas bears rather the steady glory of broad Italian noonday;
while he is distinguished also for a remarkable clearness of design, which has perhaps something to do, is certainly congruous with, a markedly religious sentiment, like that of Angelico or Perugino, lingering still in the soul of this Brescian painter towards the middle of the sixteenth century.
Romanino and Moretto, the two great masters of Brescia in successive generations, both alike inspired above all else by the majesty, the majestic beauty, of religion--its persons, its events, every circumstance that belongs to it--are to be seen in friendly rivalry, though with ten years' difference of age between them, in the Church of San Giovanni Evangelista;
Romanino approaching there, as near as he might, in a certain candle-lighted scene, to that harmony in black, white, and grey preferred by the younger painter.
Before this or that example of Moretto's work, in that admirably composed picture of Saint Paul's Conversion, for instance, you might think of him as but a very noble designer in grisaille.
A more detailed study would convince you that, whatever its component elements, there is a very complex tone which almost exclusively belongs to him; the "Saint Ursula" finally, that he is a great, though very peculiar colourist--a lord of colour who, while he knows the colour resources that may lie even in black and white, has really included every delicate hue whatever in that faded "silver grey," which yet lingers in one's memory as their final effect.
For some admirers indeed he is definable as a kind of really sanctified Titian.
It must be admitted, however, that whereas Titian sometimes lost a little of himself in the greatness of his designs, or committed their execution, in part, to others, Moretto, in his work, is always all there--thorough, steady, even, in his workmanship.
That, again, was a result of his late-surviving religious conscience.
And here, as in other instances, the supposed influence of the greater master is only a supposition.
As a matter of fact, at least in his earlier life, Moretto made no visit to Venice; developed his genius at home, under such conditions for development as were afforded by the example of the earlier masters of Brescia itself; left his work there abundantly, and almost there alone, as the thoroughly representative product of a charming place.