The Casa Mariano is a palace which belonged to a family of that name.
Like many houses of the sort in Italy, it fell to vile uses, and its
hall of audience was turned into a lumber-room. The Operai of Vercelli,
I was told, bought the palace a few years ago, restored the noble hall,
and devoted a smaller room to a collection of pictures valuable for
students of the early Vercellese style of painting. Of these there is no
need to speak. The great hall is the gem of the Casa Mariano. It has a
coved roof, with a large, flat, oblong space in the centre of the
ceiling. The whole of this vault and the lunettes beneath were painted
by Lanini; so runs the tradition of the fresco-painter's name; and
though much injured by centuries of outrage, and somewhat marred by
recent restoration, these frescos form a precious monument of Lombard
art. The object of the painter's design seems to have been the
glorification of Music. In the central compartment of the roof is an
assembly of the gods, obviously borrowed from Raphael's "Marriage of
Cupid and Psyche" in the Farnesina at Rome. The fusion of Roman
composition with Lombard execution constitutes the chief charm of this
singular work, and makes it, so far as I am aware, unique. Single
figures of the Goddesses, and the whole movement of the scene upon
Olympus, are transcribed without attempt at concealment. And yet the
fresco is not a bare-faced copy. The manner of feeling and of execution
is quite different from that of Raphael's school. The poetry and
sentiment are genuinely Lombard. None of Raphael's pupils could have
carried out his design with a delicacy of emotion and a technical skill
in coloring so consummate. What, we think, as we gaze upward, would the
master have given for such a craftsman? The hardness, coarseness, and
animal crudity of the Roman school are absent; so also is their vigor.
But where the grace of form and color is so soft and sweet, where the
high-bred calm of good company is so sympathetically rendered, where
the atmosphere of amorous languor and of melody is so artistically
diffused, we cannot miss the powerful modelling and rather vulgar _tours
de force_ of Giulio Romano. The scala of tone is silvery golden. There
are no hard blues, no coarse red flesh-tints, no black shadows. Mellow
lights, the morning hues of primrose or of palest amber, pervade the
whole society. It is a court of gentle and harmonious souls; and though
this style of beauty might cloy, at first sight there is something
ravishing in those yellow-haired, white-limbed, blooming deities. No
movement of lascivious grace as in Correggio, no perturbation of the
senses, as in some of the Venetians, disturbs the rhythm of their music;
nor is the pleasure of the flesh, though felt by the painter and
communicated to the spectator, an interruption to their divine calm. The
white, saffron-haired goddesses are grouped together like stars seen in
the topaz light of evening, like daffodils half smothered in snow-drops,
and among them Diana, with the crescent on her forehead, is the fairest.
Her dream-like beauty need fear no comparison with the Diana of the
Camera di S. Paolo. Apollo and Bacchus are scarcely less lovely in their
bloom of earliest manhood; honey-pale, as Greeks would say; like statues
of living electron; realizing Simaetha's picture of her lover and his
friend:
+tois d' en xanthotera men helichrysoio geneias,
stethea de stilbonta poly pleon e ty Selana.+
It was thus that the almost childlike spirit of the Milanese painters
felt the antique; how differently from their Roman brethren! It was thus
that they interpreted the lines of their own poets:
E i tuoi capei piu volte ho somigliati
Di Cerere a le paglie secche o bionde
Dintorno crespi al tuo capo legati.[F]
Yet the painter of this hall--whether we are to call him Lanini or
another--was not a composer. Where he has not robbed the motives and the
distribution of the figures from Raphael, he has nothing left but grace
of detail. The intellectual feebleness of his style may be seen in many
figures of women playing upon instruments of music, ranged around the
walls. One girl at the organ is graceful; another with a tambourine has
a sort of Bassarid beauty. But the group of Apollo, Pegasus, and a Muse
upon Parnassus is a failure in its meaningless frigidity, while few of
these subordinate compositions show power of conception or vigor of
design.
Lanini, like Sodoma, was a native of Vercelli; and though he was
Ferrari's pupil, there is more in him of Luini or of Sodoma than of his
master. He does not rise at any point to the height of these three great
masters, but he shares some of Luini's and Sodoma's fine qualities,
without having any of Ferrari's force. A visit to the mangled remnants
of his frescos in S. Caterina will repay the student of art. This was
once, apparently, a double church with the hall and chapel of a
_confraternita_ appended to it. One portion of the building was painted
with the history of the saint; and very lovely must this work have been,
to judge by the fragments which have recently been rescued from
whitewash, damp, and ruthless mutilation. What wonderful Lombard faces,
half obliterated on the broken wall and mouldering plaster, smile upon
us like drowned memories swimming up from the depths of oblivion!
Wherever three or four are grouped together, we find an exquisite little
picture--an old woman and two young women in a doorway, for example,
telling no story, but touching us with simple harmony of form. Nothing
further is needed to render their grace intelligible. Indeed, knowing
the faults of the school, we may seek some consolation by telling
ourselves that these incomplete fragments yield Lanini's best. In the
coved compartments of the roof, above the windows, ran a row of dancing
boys; and these are still most beautifully modelled, though the pallor
of recent whitewash is upon them. All the boys have blonde hair. They
are naked, with scrolls or ribbons wreathed round them, adding to the
airiness of their continual dance. Some of the loveliest are in a room
used to stow away the lumber of the church--old boards and curtains,
broken lanterns, candle-ends in tin sconces, the musty apparatus of
festival adornments, and in the midst of all a battered, weather-beaten
bier.