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 frescoes
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 barefaced 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 colouring 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 vigour. But where the grace of
form and colour 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 scale 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 snowdrops, 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;
realising Simaetha's picture of her lover and his friend:
[Greek:
tois d' ên xanthotera men elichrysoio geneias,
stêthea de stilbonta poly pleon ê tu Selana.[9]]
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 più volte ho somigliati
Di Cerere a le paglie secche o bionde
Dintorno crespi al tuo capo legati.[10]
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 vigour 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 frescoes in S. Caterina will repay the student
of art. This was once, apparently, a double church, or a 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 around 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.