_Il Romanino_ (Brescian: about 1485-1566).
Girolamo Romani was a native of Brescia and the son of a
painter; his family belonged originally to the small town of
Romano, in the province of Bergamo: hence his name, "Romanino."
Like Moretto (whose rival he was), he was little known outside
the district of Brescia; but he studied at Venice, where he
took Giorgione for his pattern. His best works are remarkable
for a brilliant golden colouring, which is unfortunately not
conspicuous in this picture. It pervades the fine altar-piece
of the "Madonna Enthroned" in S. Francesco at Brescia. Another
splendid altar-piece is to be seen in the museum at Padua.
Among Romanino's frescoes may be mentioned the lively scenes he
executed for the Castle of Malpaga. Copies of these are in the
Arundel Society's collection.
Of this altar-piece--painted in 1525 for the church of St. Alessandro
at Brescia--Mr. Pater gives the following description: "Alessandro,
patron of the church, one of the many youthful patrician converts
Italy reveres from the ranks of the Roman army, stands on one side,
with ample crimson banner superbly furled about his lustrous black
armour; and on the other--St. Jerome, Romanino's own namesake--neither
more nor less than the familiar, self-tormenting anchorite.... But
the loveliest subjects are in the corners above--Gaudioso, Bishop of
Brescia, above St. Jerome; above Alessandro, St. Filippo Benizzi,
meek founder of the order of Servites to which that church at Brescia
belonged, with his lily, and in the right hand a book, and what a
book!... If you wish to see what can be made of the leaves, the vellum
covers of a book, observe that in St. Philip's hands. The metre? the
contents? you ask: What may they be? and whence did it come?--Out of
embalmed sacristy, or antique coffin of some early Brescian martyr,
or, through that bright space of blue Italian sky, from the hands of
an angel, like his Annunciation lily, or the book received in the
Apocalypse by John the Divine? It is one of those old saints, Gaudioso
(at home in every church of Brescia), who looks out with full face
from the opposite corner of the altar-piece, from a background which,
though it might be the new heaven over a new earth, is in truth only
the proper, breathable air of Italy. As we see him here, Saint Gaudioso
is one of the more exquisite treasures of our National Gallery. It
was thus that, at the magic touch of Romanino's art, the dim, early,
hunted-down Brescian church of the primitive centuries, crushed into
the dust, it might seem, was 'brought to her king,' out of those old
dark crypts, 'in raiment of needlework'--the delicate, richly-folded,
pontifical white vestments, the mitre and staff and gloves, and rich
jewelled cope, blue or green.[143] The face, of remarkable beauty,
after a type which all feel, though it is actually rare in art, is
probably a portrait of some distinguished churchman of Romanino's own
day: a second Gaudioso, perhaps, setting that later Brescian church to
rights after the terrible French occupation in the painter's own time,
as his saintly predecessor, the Gaudioso of the earlier century here
commemorated, had done after the invasion of the Goths. The eloquent
eyes are open upon some glorious vision. 'He hath made us kings and
priests!' they seem to say for him, as the clean, sensitive lips might
do so eloquently. Beauty and holiness had 'kissed each other,' as in
Borgognone's imperial deacons at the Certosa. At the Renaissance the
world might seem to have parted them again. But here certainly, once
more, Catholicism and the Renaissance, religion and culture, holiness
and beauty, might seem reconciled, by one who had conceived neither
after any feeble way, in a gifted person. Here at least, by the skill
of Romanino's hand, the obscure martyr of the crypts shines as a saint
of the later Renaissance, with a sanctity of which the elegant world
itself would hardly escape the fascination, and which reminds one how
the great Apostle St. Paul has made courtesy part of the content of the
Divine charity itself. A Rubens in Italy!--so Romanino has been called.
In this gracious presence we might think that, like Rubens also, he had
been a courtier" ("Art Notes in North Italy" in _New Review_, November
1890).