Bernardino Luini

“ He may have served as model for some of those Leonardesque drawings of youths with curling hair with which we are familiar.
Painters deriving still from Leonardo but who have achieved a great celebrity of their own are Bernardino Luini and Gaudenzio Ferrari. Luini is the most popular painter of the Lombard school, probably because his paintings are so numerous and therefore widely known. There is always a sweetness and charm in his work, though rather superficial and sentimental, and in the best examples he attains beauty and dignity ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is well to remember that the Saronno portrait makes the painter look much older than he is supposed to have been.
To his contemporaries it is clear that [Pg 76] Luini was a man of small importance. His best work is seen outside the radius of the great Art centres of Italy, and it was only when he attracted the attention of great critics and sound judges like Morelli, John Ruskin, and John Addington Symonds that the lovers of beautiful pictures began to go out of their way to find his best work in the little towns whose churchmen were his patrons. ”

“ Had Luini chanced to be invited to Venice or to Rome he would have been honoured throughout Lombardy; but a painter like a prophet is often without honour in his own country. Luini’s gifts were of a more quiet and domestic order than those of his great contemporaries Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, for example, were more than painters, and perhaps it was only in Venice that painting stood by itself and managed to thrive alone. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Luini, therefore, may have been one of Vinci's disciples; and he certainly frequented his academy. Others indeed of the school surpassed him in delicacy of hand, and in the pleasing effect of the chiaroscuro, a quality for which Lomazzo commends Cesare da Sesto, declaring that Luini drew his shadows in too coarse a style. Notwithstanding this, no artist approached nearer Vinci, both in point of design and colouring than Bernardino, who very frequently composed in a taste so like that of his master, that out of Milan many of his pieces pass for those of Vinci. ”

“ The subject of girls playing at the game of “hot-cockles,” and that of three angels depositing St Catherine in her sepulchre, are particularly memorable, each of them a work of perfect charm and grace in its way. In the Casa Silva, Milan, are frescoes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The Monastero Maggiore of Milan (or church of S. Maurizio) is a noble treasure-house of Luini’s art—including a large Crucifixion, with about one hundred and forty figures ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Great Masters in Painting and Sculpture.
Edited by G. C. WILLIAMSON, Litt.D.
Post 8vo, each with 40 illustrations and photogravure frontispiece. 5s. net.
BERNARDINO LUINI. By G. C. Williamson, Litt.D.
VELASQUEZ. By R. A. M. Stevenson. ”

“ The qualities of cleverness and brilliance pall after a little time, the mere conquest of technical difficulties of the kind that have been self-inflicted rouses admiration for a while and then leaves us cold. But the man who is the happy possessor of a fresco or a panel picture by Luini is to be envied. Even he who lives in the neighbourhood of some gallery or church and only sees the rare master’s works where, “blackening in the daily candle smoke, they moulder on the damp wall’s travertine,” will never tire of Luini’s company. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 is not unreasonable to suppose that records of Luini’s life exist, and in these days when scholarship is ever extending its boundaries there is hope that some scholar will lay the ever growing circle of the painter’s admirers under lasting obligations. Until that time comes we must be content to know the man through the work that he has left behind him, through the medium of fading frescoes, stray altarpieces, and a few panel pictures. ”

“ Luini is, perhaps, the best central type of the highly-trained Italian painter. He is the only man who entirely united the religious temper which was the spirit-life of art, with the physical power which was its bodily life. He joins the purity and passion of Angelico to the strength of Veronese: the two elements, poised in perfect balance, are so calmed and restrained, each by the other, that most of us lose the sense of both. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If we are to take into consideration all the qualities of the artistic expression of form, it cannot be maintained, and in subtlety of line alone it can hardly be held, for when he had a form to follow no one could surpass Da Vinci; but in the feeling for beauty of line and tender expression coupled with subtle drawing, I believe that Luini justifies the praise of the critic.
Note by Timothy Cole on the "St. Apollonia" of Luini. Luini is seen at his best in Milan, where are found latest works—those of his third, or "blond," manner, in which he attains his fullest strength and independence. ”

“ He seemed surrounded by shadowy throngs of beautiful forms, younger sisters of the slender-limbed women of Parmigianino with their long necks and large, narrow princess hands; they sat at his table, poured his wine with movements full of noble grace, and held him in the spell of their fair dreams with Luini’s mystic, contemplative smile, so inscrutably subtle in its enigmatic sweetness. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Catalogue of the Educational Series, p. 43; Oxford Lectures on Art, §§ 73, 92) . This picture, formerly ascribed to Leonardo, belongs to Luini's second period, when he was under the [Pg 90] influence of that master. To his third and independent manner belong the frescoes at Milan, Saronno, and Lugano, and the three pictures in Como Cathedral (Morelli's Italian Masters in German Galleries, 1883, pp. 435-438) . Luini's female figures (says Sir Frederick Burton) "are full of sweetness and gracious dignity; and should we incline to cavil at the monotony of his type, its loveliness disarms us. ”

“ 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. ”