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

neighbouring 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 Gandenzio 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 frescoes by Luini of S. Rocco, S. Sebastian,

S. Christopher, and S. Antony--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 frescoes 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 coryphæus 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

colour. 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 harmonised 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. Bach too has specific character, while all are robust and

full of life, intent upon the service set them. Their instruments

of music are all the lutes and viols, flutes, cymbals, drums, fifes,

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

of colour, as usual with Ferrari, is a little heavy; nor are the tints

satisfactorily harmonised. But the vigour 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 vulgarised 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 nought 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 colour 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--_Gefühl 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 those Parmese

frescoes, 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 frescoes of

the 'Marriage of the Virgin,' and the 'Dispute with the Doctors.'[11]

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

S. 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 frescoes. 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

colour in fresco. The blues detach themselves too much, perhaps, from

the rest of the colouring; and that is all a devil's advocate could

say. It is possible that the absence of blue makes the S. Catherine

frescoes 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 Lionardesque 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 idyll, is Sodoma; and the work of his which comes

nearest to Luini's masterpieces is the legend of S. Benedict, at

Monte Oliveto, near Siena. Yet Sodoma had not all Luini's innocence or

_naïveté._ 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.