SARONNO.

The Church of Saronno is a pretty building with a Bramantesque cupola,

standing among meadows at some distance from the little town. It is the

object of a special cult, which draws pilgrims from the neighboring

country-side; but the concourse is not large enough to load the

sanctuary with unnecessary wealth. Everything is very quiet in the holy

place, and the offerings of the pious seem to have been only just enough

to keep the building and its treasures of art in repair. The church

consists of a nave, a central cupola, a vestibule leading to the choir,

the choir itself, and a small tribune behind the choir. No other single

building in North Italy can boast so much that is first-rate of the work

of Luini and Gaudenzio Ferrari.

The cupola is raised on a sort of drum composed of twelve pieces,

perforated with round windows and supported on four massive piers. On

the level of the eye are frescos by Luini of St. Rocco, St. Sebastian,

St. Christopher, and St. Anthony--by no means in his best style, and

inferior to all his other paintings in this church. The Sebastian, for

example, shows an effort to vary the traditional treatment of this

saint. He is tied in a sprawling attitude to a tree; and little of

Luini's special pathos or sense of beauty--the melody of idyllic grace

made spiritual--appears in him. These four saints are on the piers.

Above are frescos from the early Bible history by Lanini, painted in

continuation of Ferrari's medallions from the story of Adam expelled

from Paradise, which fill the space beneath the cupola, leading the eye

upward to Ferrari's masterpiece.

The dome itself is crowded with a host of angels singing and playing

upon instruments of music. At each of the twelve angles of the drum

stands a coryphaeus of this celestial choir, full length, with waving

drapery. Higher up, the golden-haired, broad-winged divine creatures are

massed together, filling every square inch of the vault with color. Yet

there is no confusion. The simplicity of the selected motive and the

necessities of the place acted like a check on Ferrari, who, in spite of

his dramatic impulse, could not tell a story coherently or fill a canvas

with harmonized variety. There is no trace of his violence here. Though

the motion of music runs through the whole multitude like a breeze,

though the joy expressed is a real _tripudio celeste_, not one of all

these angels flings his arms abroad or makes a movement that disturbs

the rhythm. We feel that they are keeping time and resting quietly, each

in his appointed seat, as though the sphere was circling with them round

the throne of God, who is their centre and their source of gladness.

Unlike Correggio and his imitators, Ferrari has introduced no clouds,

and has in no case made the legs of his angels prominent. It is a mass

of noble faces and voluminously robed figures, emerging each above the

other like flowers in a vase. Each too has specific character, while

all are robust and full of life, intent upon the service set them. Their

instruments of music are all lutes and viols, flutes, cymbals, drums,

fifes, citherns, organs, and harps that Ferrari's day could show. The

scale of color, as usual with Ferrari, is a little heavy; nor are the

tints satisfactorily harmonized. But the vigor and invention of the

whole work would atone for minor defects of far greater consequence.

It is natural, beneath this dome, to turn aside and think one moment of

Correggio at Parma. Before the _macchinisti_ of the seventeenth century

had vulgarized the motive, Correggio's bold attempt to paint heaven in

flight from earth--earth left behind in the persons of the apostles

standing round the empty tomb, heaven soaring upward with a spiral

vortex into the abyss of light above--had an originality which set at

naught all criticism. There is such ecstasy of jubilation, such

rapturous rapidity of flight, that we who strain our eyes from below

feel we are in the darkness of the grave which Mary left. A kind of

controlling rhythm for the composition is gained by placing Gabriel,

Madonna, and Christ at three points in the swirl of angels.

Nevertheless, composition--the presiding, all-controlling intellect--is

just what makes itself felt by absence; and Correggio's special

qualities of light and color have now so far vanished from the cupola of

the Duomo that the constructive poverty is not disguised. Here, if

anywhere in painting, we may apply Goethe's words--_Gefuehl ist Alles_.

If, then, we return to Ferrari's angels at Saronno, we find that the

painter of Varallo chose a safer though a far more modest theme. Nor did

he expose himself to that most cruel of all degradations which the

ethereal genius of Correggio has suffered from incompetent imitators. To

daub a tawdry and superficial reproduction of these Parmese frescos, to

fill the cupolas of Italy with veritable _guazzetti di rane_, was

comparatively easy; and between our intelligence and what remains of

that stupendous masterpiece of boldness crowd a thousand memories of

such ineptitude. On the other hand, nothing but solid work and

conscientious inspiration could enable any workman, however able, to

follow Ferrari in the path struck out by him at Saronno. His cupola has

had no imitator; and its only rival is the noble pendant painted at

Varallo by his own hand, of angels in adoring anguish round the cross.

In the ante-choir of the sanctuary are Luini's priceless frescos of the

"Marriage of the Virgin" and the "Dispute with the Doctors."[G] Their

execution is flawless, and they are perfectly preserved. If criticism

before such admirable examples of so excellent a master be permissible,

it may be questioned whether the figures are not too crowded, whether

the groups are sufficiently varied and connected by rhythmic lines. Yet

the concords of yellow and orange with blue in the "Sposalizio," and the

blendings of dull violet and red in the "Disputa," make up for much of

stiffness. Here, as in the Chapel of St. Catherine at Milan, we feel

that Luini was the greatest colourist among _frescanti_. In the

"Sposalizio" the female heads are singularly noble and idyllically

graceful. Some of the young men too have Luini's special grace and

abundance of golden hair. In the "Disputa" the gravity and dignity of

old men are above all things striking.

Passing into the choir, we find on either hand the "Adoration of the

Magi" and the "Purification of the Virgin," two of Luini's divinest

frescos. Above them in lunettes are four Evangelists and four Latin

Fathers, with four Sibyls. Time and neglect have done no damage here;

and here, again, perforce we notice perfect mastery of color in fresco.

The blues detach themselves too much, perhaps, from the rest of the

coloring; and that is all a devil's advocate could say. It is possible

that the absence of blue makes the St. Catherine frescos in the

Monastero Maggiore at Milan surpass all other works of Luini. But

nowhere else has he shown more beauty and variety in detail than here.

The group of women led by Joseph, the shepherd carrying the lamb upon

his shoulder, the girl with a basket of white doves, the child with an

apple on the altar-steps, the lovely youth in the foreground heedless of

the scene; all these are idyllic incidents treated with the purest, the

serenest, the most spontaneous, the truest, most instinctive sense of

beauty. The landscape includes a view of Saronno, and an episodical

picture of the "Flight into Egypt," where a white-robed angel leads the

way. All these lovely things are in the "Purification," which is dated

_Bernardinus Lovinus pinxit_, MDXXV.

The fresco of the "Magi" is less notable in detail, and in general

effect is more spoiled by obtrusive blues. There is, however, one young

man of wholly Leonardesque loveliness, whose divine innocence of

adolescence, unalloyed by serious thought, unstirred by passions, almost

forces a comparison with Sodoma. The only painter who approaches Luini

in what may be called the Lombard, to distinguish it from the Venetian

idyl, is Sodoma; and the work of his which comes nearest to Luini's

masterpieces is the legend of St. Benedict, at Monte Oliveto, near

Siena. Yet Sodoma had not all Luini's innocence or _naivete_. If he

added something slightly humorous which has an indefinite charm, he

lacked that freshness, as of "cool, meek-blooded flowers" and boyish

voices, which fascinates us in Luini. Sodoma was closer to the earth,

and feared not to impregnate what he saw of beauty with the fiercer

passions of his nature. If Luini had felt passion who shall say? It

appears nowhere in his work, where life is toned to a religious

joyousness. When Shelley compared the poetry of the Theocritean

amourists to the perfume of the tuberose, and that of the earlier Greek

poets to "a meadow-gale of June, which mingles the fragrance of all the

flowers of the field," he supplied us with critical images which may not

unfairly be used to point the distinction between Sodoma at Monte

Oliveto and Luini at Saronno.