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 S.
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
S. 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
frescoes 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, S. 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 colour. Every square inch is covered with
fresco or rich woodwork, 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 S. Martin and the glorified
Madonna of the Brera frescoes. It is not impossible that the male
saints of the loggia may be also his, though a tenderer touch, a
something more nearly Lionardesque 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 S.
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 Pietà, an Assumption, Saints and Founders
of the church, group themselves under the influence of Luini's
harmonising colour 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, honoured 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 S. 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 frescoes,
they are far surpassed both in value and interest by his paintings in
the side chapel of S. 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
favourite types. The chapel was decorated at the expense of a Milanese
advocate, Francesco Besozzi, who died in 1529. It is he who is
kneeling, grey-haired and bareheaded, under the protection of S.
Catherine of Alexandria, intently gazing at Christ unbound from the
scourging pillar. On the other side stand S. Lawrence and S. 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 S.
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 S.
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 colouring. The most tragic
situation has here again been alchemised by Luini's magic into a
pure idyll, without the loss of power, without the sacrifice of
edification.
S. 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 Monistero 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 favour. 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 15,000 golden crowns with which she hoped to
bribe her jailors, she was finally beheaded. Thus did a vulgar and
infamous Messalina, distinguished only by rare beauty, furnish Luini
with a S. Catherine for this masterpiece of pious art! The thing seems
scarcely credible. Yet Bandello lived in Milan while the Church of
S. 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.