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 [100] 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 [101] 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.
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 [100] 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 [101] 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.