James Mason

“ We grumble at Vasari, we ridicule his inaccuracies, we regret his limitations, we scoff at his prejudices, but when he withholds the light of his investigation from contemporary painters who did not enjoy the favour of popes and emperors, we wander in a desert land without a guide, and search with little or no success for the details that would serve to set the painter before us. ”

“ He could not have failed to be impressed by the extraordinary beauty of the artist’s conceptions, the skill of his treatment of single figures, the wealth of the curious and elusive charm that we call atmosphere—a charm to which all the world’s masterpieces are indebted in varying degrees—the all-pervading [Pg 17] sense of a delightful and refined personality, leaves us eager for the facts that must have been well within the grasp of the painter’s contemporaries. ”

“ We may suppose that the objects of the Society roused Luini’s sympathy to an extent that made it easy for him to accept the somewhat paltry remuneration with which the Brotherhood of the Holy Crown rewarded him, and so the picture makes its own appeal on the painter’s behalf, and tells a story of his claims upon our regard. A man may lie, in fact it may be suggested on the strength of the Psalmist’s statement that most men do, but an artist’s life work tells his story in spite of himself, and if he labour with pen or brush his truest biography will be seen in what he leaves behind him. ”

“ Every man knew that God was in heaven, and that if the workers of iniquity flourished, it was that they might be destroyed for ever. Every man knew that the saints still exerted their supernatural powers and would come down to earth if need be to protect a devotee. Satan, on the other hand, went armed about the earth seeking whom he might devour, and hell was as firmly fixed as heaven. In order to understand Luini, his life and times, these facts must be borne in mind. ”

“ Long periods of study will not exhaust all there is to learn about men like Titian, Michelangelo, Raphael of Urbino, and the rest, but Luini, though he left no written record, will not be denied. We dare not pass him by, seeing that we may introduce him to some admirers who will, in days to come, seek and find what remains beyond our reach at present. ”

“ This is little more than a variant of the story that he went to Monza under similar circumstances and obtained the protection of the Pelucca family on the same terms. In the absence of anything in the nature of reliable record this story has been able to pass, but against it one likes to put the tradition that one of the heads in the frescoes is that of Luini himself. We find that head so simple, so refined, and so old—the beard is long and the hair is scanty—and so serene in its expression that it is exceedingly difficult to believe that brawling could have entered into the artist’s life. ”

“ Perhaps the wish was father to the thought, and because every man who sets out to study the life and work of an artist is as anxious to know as was Miss Rosa Dartle herself, there are always facts of a sort at his service. He [Pg 32] who seeks the truth can always be supplied with something as much like it as paste is to diamonds, and can supplement the written word with the aid of tradition. ”

“ The lack of all record was essentially the misfortune that beset men who were not very high in the esteem of their contemporaries. A painter like Luini would have executed a great many pictures for people who could not pay very well, and had no great gallery or well-built church to harbour the work, and in the [Pg 54] course of time the work would tend inevitably to disappear before the devouring candle-smoke, or to be carried away by unscrupulous purchasers who chanced to be better equipped with taste than conscience. ”

“ His appeal is so irresistible, the beauty of his work is so rare and so enduring that we must endeavour to the best of our ability, however small it be, to declare his praise, to stimulate inquiry, enlarge his circle, and give him the place that belongs to him of right. There are painters in plenty whose work is admired [Pg 27] and praised, whose claims we acknowledge instantly while admitting to ourselves that we should not care to live with their pictures hanging on round us. ”

“ A conqueror could have gathered up in the hollow of his hand all the cities, Milan excepted, in which Luini worked throughout his well-spent life, and in the stress and strife of the later years when great pictures did change hands from time to time by conquest, Luini’s panel pictures in the little cities of his labours passed quite unnoticed, while even if the frescoes were admired it was not easy to move them. When at last his undoubted merits began to attract attention of connoisseurs, these connoisseurs were wondering why Leonardo da Vinci had left such a small [Pg 78] number of pictures. ”

“ He will always find inspiration, encouragement, or consolation in the reflection of the serene and beautiful [Pg 28] outlook upon life that gave the work so much of its enduring merit. Luini, whatever manner of man he may have been, was so clearly enamoured of beauty, so clearly intolerant of what is ugly and unrefined, that he shrank from all that was coarse and revolting either in the life around him or in certain aspects of the Bible stories that gave him subjects for his brush. ”

“ There were some who rose to fame and fortune during their life, and then died so completely that no biography can hope to rouse any interest in their work among succeeding generations.
There were others who worked in silence and without réclame of any sort, content with the respect and esteem of those with whom they came into immediate contact, indifferent to the plaudits of the crowd or the noisy praises of those who are not qualified to judge. True servants of the western world’s religion, they translated work into terms of moral life, and moral [Pg 11] life into terms of work. ”

“ Bernardino Luini, the subject of this little study, calls us away from the great art centres—from Venice and Florence and Rome; his record was made and is to be found to-day amid the plains of Lombardy. Milan is not always regarded as one of the great art centres of Italy in spite of the [Pg 12] Brera, the Ambrosiana, and the Poldi Pezzoli Palace collections, but no lover of pictures ever went for the first time to the galleries of Milan in a reverent spirit and with a patient eye without feeling that he had discovered a painter of genius. ”

“ Nor are the “Iliad” and the fragments that remain of the works of the great Greek sculptors less to us because a shadowy tradition is all that surrounds the lives of the men who gave immortal work to the world. We must remember that it is as difficult to deal with art in terms of literature as it is to express the subtle charm of music in words. ”

“ This is another admirably painted study of the artist’s favourite subject. The attitude of the child is most engaging, the painting of the limbs is full of skill, and the background adds considerably to the picture’s attractions. It will be noted that Luini appears to have employed the same model for most of his studies of the Madonna. ”

“ It might be held, seeing that the artist’s work is scanty, and often in the last stages of decay, while his life story has faded quite from the recovered records of his contemporaries, that Luini is hardly fit subject for [Pg 25] discussion here. In a series of little books that seeks to introduce great artists to new friends through the medium of reproductions that show the work as it is, and a brief concise description that aims at helping those who are interested to study the master for themselves, there is a temptation to deal only with popular men. ”

“ Where the works have failed to triumph as expressions of a living faith they have charmed agnostics as an expression of enduring beauty.
From Milan Luini seems to have gone to Monza, a city a few miles away from the capital of Lombardy where the rulers [Pg 45] of united Italy come after their coronation to receive the iron crown that has been worn by the kings of Lombardy for nearly a thousand years. This is the city in which the late King Umberto, that brave and good man, was foully murdered by an anarchist. ”

“ They would seem to have profited by their covering for as much as has been uncovered is rich and well preserved. It may be that in days when the State of Italy was seriously disturbed, and Napoleon, greatest of highwaymen and conquerors, after being crowned in Milan with the famous Monza crown, was laying his hand on all that seemed worth carrying away, some one in authority thought of this simple method of concealment, and obtained expert advice that enabled the frescoes to be covered without serious damage. ”

“ Merit like truth will out, and when time has sifted good work from bad and spurious reputations from genuine ones, many men who fluttered the dovecotes of their own generation disappear from sight altogether ”

“ He is said to have written poems and essays, though we are not in a position to say where they are to be found, and it is clear that he had a singularly detached spirit and that the hand of a skilled painter was associated with the mind of a little child. In some aspects he is as simple as those primitive painters of Umbria whose backgrounds are all of gold. Like so many other painters of the Renaissance Luini’s saints and angels are peasant folk, the people [Pg 42] he saw around him. ”

“ Were his patrons great men who rewarded him as he deserved—how did he fare when [Pg 16] the evening came wherein no man may work? Surely there is ample scope for the score of quaint comments and amusing if unreliable anecdotes with which Vasari livens his pages. We are confident that there will be much to reward the search, because Bernardino Luini and Giorgio Vasari were contemporaries after a fashion. Vasari would have been twenty-one years old when Luini died, the writer of the “Lives” would have seen frescoes and panel pictures in all the glory of their first creation. ”

“ Our only hope lies in the discovery of some rich store of information in the public or private libraries of Milan among the manuscripts that are the delight of the scholars. Countless documents lie unread, many famous libraries are uncatalogued, the [Pg 20] archives of several noble Italian houses that played an important part in fifteenth and sixteenth century Italy have still to be given to the world. ”

“ The prices paid to him are ridiculously small, no more than a living wage, but he had the reputation of being a reliable and painstaking artist and he would seem to have been content with a small reward for work that appealed to him. His early commissions executed in and around Milan when he first came from Luini were numerous and consisted very largely of frescoes which are the work of a [Pg 43] young man who has not yet freed his own individuality from the influence of his elders. ”

“ So many of the lesser men had all his faults—that is to say, lack of perspective and inability to compose a big picture—that he was classed with them by those critics whose special gift lies in the discovery of faults. ”

“ The greater the unrest in the cities the more the public attention would be turned to statesmen and warriors, and when the personalities of artists began to be considered, those who lived and thrived in the entourage of popes and rulers monopolised the attention. ”

“ If we look at the portraits the painter is said to have made of himself and to have placed in pictures at Saronna and elsewhere we shall see that Luini was hardly the type of man to have [Pg 48] engaged in the idle pursuits of chivalry in the intervals of the work to which his life was given. We have the head of a man of thought not that of a man of action, and all the character of the face gives the lie to the suggestions of the storytellers. It is clear, however, that the painter made a long stay in Monza and when he came back to Milan he worked for the churches of St. ”

“ These give no trouble to their biographer or his readers, but after all it is not the number of pictures that an artist paints or the wealth of detail that his admirers have collected that establishes his claim to be placed among the immortals. ”