The student of art in Italy, after mastering the characters of different
styles and epochs, finds a final satisfaction in the contemplation of
buildings designed and decorated by one master, or by groups of artists
interpreting the spirit of a single period. Such supreme monuments of
the national genius are not very common, and they are therefore the more
precious. Giotto's chapel at Padua; the Villa Farnesina at Rome, built
by Peruzzi and painted in fresco by Raphael and Sodoma; the Palazzo del
Te at Mantua, Giulio Romano's masterpiece; the Scuola di San Rocco,
illustrating the Venetian Renaissance at its climax, might be cited
among the most splendid of these achievements. In the church of the
Monastero Maggiore at Milan, dedicated to San Maurizio, Lombard
architecture and fresco-painting may be studied in this rare
combination. The monastery itself, one of the oldest in Milan, formed a
retreat for cloistered virgins following the rule of St. Benedict. It
may have been founded as early as the tenth century; but its church was
rebuilt in the first two decades of the sixteenth, between 1503 and
1519, and was immediately afterwards decorated with frescos by Luini and
his pupils. Gian Giacomo Dolcebono, architect and sculptor, called by
his fellow-craftsmen _magistro di taliare pietre_, gave the design, at
once simple and harmonious, which was carried out with hardly any
deviation from his plan. The church is a long parallelogram, divided
into two unequal portions, the first and smaller for the public, the
second for the nuns. The walls are pierced with rounded and pilastered
windows, ten on each side, four of which belong to the outer and six to
the inner section. The dividing wall or septum rises to the point from
which the groinings of the roof spring; and round three sides of the
whole building, north, east, and south, runs a gallery for the use of
the convent. The altars of the inner and outer church are placed against
the septum, back to back, with certain differences of structure that
need not be described. Simple and severe, San Maurizio owes its
architectural beauty wholly and entirely to purity of line and
perfection of proportion. There is a prevailing spirit of repose, a
sense of space, fair, lightsome, and adapted to serene moods of the
meditative fancy in this building which is singularly at variance with
the religious mysticism and imaginative grandeur of a Gothic edifice.
The principal beauty of the church, however, is its tone of color. Every
square inch is covered with fresco or rich wood-work mellowed by time
into that harmony of tints which blends the work of greater and lesser
artists in one golden hue of brown. Round the arcades of the
convent-loggia run delicate arabesques with faces of fair female
saints--Catherine, Agnes, Lucy, Agatha--gem-like or star-like, gazing
from their gallery upon the church below. The Luinesque smile is on
their lips and in their eyes, quiet, refined, as though the emblems of
their martyrdom brought back no thought of pain to break the Paradise of
rest in which they dwell. There are twenty-six in all--a sisterhood of
stainless souls, the lilies of Love's garden planted round Christ's
throne. Soldier saints are mingled with them in still smaller rounds
above the windows, chosen to illustrate the virtues of an order which
renounced the world. To decide whose hand produced these masterpieces of
Lombard suavity and grace, or whether more than one, would not be easy.
Near the altar we can perhaps trace the style of Bartolommeo Suardi in
an Annunciation painted on the spandrils--that heroic style, large and
noble, known to us by the chivalrous St. Martin and the glorified
Madonna of the Brera frescos. It is not impossible that the male saints
of the loggia may be also his, though a tenderer touch, a something more
nearly Leonardesque in its quietude, must be discerned in Lucy and her
sisters. The whole of the altar in this inner church belongs to Luini.
Were it not for darkness and decay, we should pronounce this series of
the Passion in nine great compositions, with saints and martyrs and
torch-bearing genii, to be one of his most ambitious and successful
efforts. As it is, we can but judge in part; the adolescent beauty of
Sebastian, the grave compassion of St. Rocco, the classical perfection
of the cupid with lighted tapers, the gracious majesty of women smiling
on us sideways from their Lombard eyelids--these remain to haunt our
memory, emerging from the shadows of the vault above.
The inner church, as is fitting, excludes all worldly elements. We are
in the presence of Christ's agony, relieved and tempered by the sunlight
of those beauteous female faces. All is solemn here, still as the
convent, pure as the meditations of a novice. We pass the septum, and
find ourselves in the outer church appropriated to the laity. Above the
high-altar the whole wall is covered with Luini's loveliest work, in
excellent light and far from ill preserved. The space divides into eight
compartments. A Pieta, an Assumption, Saints and Founders of the church,
group themselves under the influence of Luini's harmonizing color into
one symphonious whole. But the places of distinction are reserved for
two great benefactors of the convent, Alessandro de' Bentivogli and his
wife, Ippolita Sforza. When the Bentivogli were expelled from Bologna by
the papal forces, Alessandro settled at Milan, where he dwelt, honored
by the Sforzas and allied to them by marriage, till his death in 1532.
He was buried in the monastery by the side of his sister Alessandra, a
nun of the order. Luini has painted the illustrious exile in his habit
as he lived. He is kneeling, as though in ever-during adoration of the
altar mystery, attired in a long black senatorial robe trimmed with
furs. In his left hand he holds a book; and above his pale, serenely
noble face is a little black berretta. Saints attend him, as though
attesting to his act of faith. Opposite kneels Ippolita, his wife, the
brilliant queen of fashion, the witty leader of society, to whom
Bandello dedicated his Novelle, and whom he praised as both incomparably
beautiful and singularly learned. Her queenly form is clothed from head
to foot in white brocade, slashed and trimmed with gold lace, and on her
forehead is a golden circlet. She has the proud port of a princess, the
beauty of a woman past her prime, but stately, the indescribable dignity
of attitude which no one but Luini could have rendered so majestically
sweet. In her hand is a book; and she, like Alessandro, has her saintly
sponsors, Agnes and Catherine and St. Scolastica.
Few pictures bring the splendid Milanese court so vividly before us as
these portraits of the Bentivogli: they are, moreover, very precious for
the light they throw on what Luini could achieve in the secular style so
rarely touched by him. Great, however, as are these frescos, they are
far surpassed both in value and interest by his paintings in the side
chapel of St. Catherine. Here more than anywhere else, more even than at
Saronno or Lugano, do we feel the true distinction of Luini--his
unrivalled excellence as a colourist, his power over pathos, the
refinement of his feeling, and the peculiar beauty of his favorite
types. The chapel was decorated at the expense of a Milanese advocate,
Francesco Besozzi, who died in 1529. It is he who is kneeling,
gray-haired and bare-headed, under the protection of St. Catherine of
Alexandria, intently gazing at Christ unbound from the scourging-pillar.
On the other side stand St. Lawrence and St. Stephen, pointing to the
Christ and looking at us, as though their lips were framed to say:
"Behold and see if there be any sorrow like unto his sorrow." Even the
soldiers who have done their cruel work seem softened. They untie the
cords tenderly, and support the fainting form, too weak to stand alone.
What sadness in the lovely faces of Sts. Catherine and Lawrence! What
divine anguish in the loosened limbs and bending body of Christ; what
piety in the adoring old man! All the moods proper to this supreme
tragedy of the faith are touched as in some tenor song with low
accompaniment of viols; for it was Luini's special province to feel
profoundly and to express musically. The very depth of the Passion is
there; and yet there is no discord.
Just in proportion to this unique faculty for yielding a melodious
representation of the most intense moments of stationary emotion was his
inability to deal with a dramatic subject. The first episode of St.
Catherine's execution, when the wheel was broken and the executioners
struck by lightning, is painted in this chapel without energy and with a
lack of composition that betrays the master's indifference to his
subject. Far different is the second episode when Catherine is about to
be beheaded. The executioner has raised his sword to strike. She, robed
in brocade of black and gold, so cut as to display the curve of neck
and back, while the bosom is covered, leans her head above her praying
hands, and waits the blow in sweetest resignation. Two soldiers stand at
some distance in a landscape of hill and meadow; and far up are seen the
angels carrying her body to its tomb upon Mount Sinai. I cannot find
words or summon courage to describe the beauty of this picture--its
atmosphere of holy peace, the dignity of its composition, the golden
richness of its coloring. The most tragic situation has here again been
alchemized by Luini's magic into a pure idyl, without the loss of power,
without the sacrifice of edification.
St. Catherine, in this incomparable fresco, is a portrait, the history
of which so strikingly illustrates the relation of the arts to religion
on the one hand, and to life on the other, in the age of the
Renaissance, that it cannot be omitted. At the end of his fourth
Novella, having related the life of the Contessa di Cellant, Bandello
says: "And so the poor woman was beheaded; such was the end of her
unbridled desires; and he who would fain see her painted to the life,
let him go to the Church of the Monastero Maggiore, and there will he
behold her portrait." The Contessa di Cellant was the only child of a
rich usurer who lived at Casal Monferrato. Her mother was a Greek; and
she was a girl of such exquisite beauty that, in spite of her low
origin, she became the wife of the noble Ermes Visconti in her sixteenth
year. He took her to live with him at Milan, where she frequented the
house of the Bentivogli, but none other. Her husband told Bandello that
he knew her temper better than to let her visit with the freedom of the
Milanese ladies. Upon his death, while she was little more than twenty,
she retired to Casale and led a gay life among many lovers. One of
these, the Count of Cellant in the Val d'Aosta, became her second
husband, conquered by her extraordinary loveliness. They could not,
however, agree together. She left him, and established herself at Pavia.
Rich with her father's wealth and still of most seductive beauty, she
now abandoned herself to a life of profligacy. Three among her lovers
must be named: Ardizzino Valperga, Count of Masino; Roberto Sanseverino,
of the princely Naples family; and Don Pietro di Cardona, a Sicilian.
With each of the two first she quarrelled, and separately besought each
to murder the other. They were friends, and frustrated her plans by
communicating them to one another. The third loved her with the insane
passion of a very young man. What she desired, he promised to do
blindly; and she bade him murder his two predecessors in her favor. At
this time she was living at Milan, where the Duke of Bourbon was acting
as viceroy for the emperor. Don Pietro took twenty-five armed men of his
household and waylaid the Count of Masino as he was returning, with his
brother and eight or nine servants, late one night from supper. Both the
brothers and the greater part of their suite were killed; but Don Pietro
was caught. He revealed the atrocity of his mistress; and she was sent
to prison. Incapable of proving her innocence, and prevented from
escaping, in spite of fifteen thousand golden crowns with which she
hoped to bribe her jailers, she was finally beheaded. Thus did a vulgar
and infamous Messalina, distinguished only by rare beauty, furnish Luini
with a St. Catherine for this masterpiece of pious art! The thing seems
scarcely credible. Yet Bandello lived in Milan while the Church of St.
Maurizio was being painted; nor does he show the slightest sign of
disgust at the discord between the Contessa's life and her artistic
presentation in the person of a royal martyr.