Part 1 (2/2)
As we have said already nothing is known of Luini's early life, although the fact that he was born at Luino on the Lago Maggiore seems to be beyond dispute. The people of that little lake side town have no doubt at all about the matter, and they say that the family was one of some distinction, that Giacomo of Luino who founded a monastery in his native place was the painter's uncle. 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 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 early life of the artist is a blank, and the authorities are by no means in agreement about the year of his birth.
1470 would seem to be a reasonable date, with a little lat.i.tude on either side. Many men writing long years after the painter's death, have held that he was a pupil of Leonardo da Vinci, indeed several pictures that were attributed to da Vinci by the authorities of different European galleries are now recognised as Luini's work, but the mistake is not at all difficult to explain. If we turn to ”La Joconda,” a portrait by da Vinci that hangs in the Louvre to-day, and is apparently beyond dispute in the eyes of the present generation of critics, and then go through the Brera in Milan with a photograph of ”La Joconda's” portrait in our hand, it will be impossible to overlook the striking resemblance between Luini's types and da Vinci's smiling model. Leonardo had an academy in Milan, and it is reasonable to suppose that Luini worked in it, although at the time when he is supposed to have come for the first time to the capital of Lombardy, Leonardo da Vinci had left, apparently because Louis XII. of France, cousin and successor of that Charles VIII. who had troubled the peace of Italy for so long, was thundering at the city gates, and at such a time great artists were apt to remember that they had good patrons elsewhere. The school may, however, have remained open because no great rulers made war on artists, and Luini would have learned something of the spirit that animated Leonardo's pictures. For other masters and influence he seems to have gone to Bramantino and Foppa.
Bramantino was a painter of Milan and Ambrosio Foppa known as Caradosso was a native of Pavia and should not be reckoned among Milanese artists as he has so often been. He was renowned for the beauty of his medals and his goldsmith's work; and he was one of the men employed by the great family of Bentivoglio.
[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE IV.--THE MYSTIC MARRIAGE OF ST. CATHERINE
(In the Brera, Milan)
This is a singularly attractive picture in which the child Christ may be seen placing the ring upon the finger of St. Catherine. The little open background, although free from the slightest suggestion of Palestine, is very charming, and the head of the Virgin and St.
Catherine help to prove that Luini used few models.]
It may be mentioned in this place that many Italian artists, particularly those of the Florentine schools, suffered very greatly from their unceasing devotion to the art of the miniaturist. They sought to achieve his detail, his fine but cramped handling, and this endeavour was fatal to them when they came to paint large pictures that demanded skilled composition, and the subordination of detail to a large general effect. The influence of the miniature painter and the maker of medals kept many a fifteenth-century painter in the second grade and Luini never quite survived his early devotion to their methods, often making the fatal mistake of covering a large canvas with many figures of varying size but equal value. It may be remarked that Tintoretto was the first great painter of the Renaissance who learned to subordinate parts to the whole, and he had to face a great deal of unpopularity because he saw with his own eyes instead of using those of his predecessors.
[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE V.--THE MADONNA OF THE ROSE
(In the Brera, Milan)
Modern criticism proclaims this picture of the Virgin in a Bower of Roses to be the finest of the master's paintings. Not only is it delightfully composed and thought out but the background is painted with rare skill, and the colour is rich and pleasing to this day.]
It may be suggested, with all possible respect to those who hold different opinions, that Luini, though he responded to certain influences, had no master in the generally accepted sense of the term.
One cannot trace the definite relation between him and any older painter that we find between t.i.tian and Gian Bellini, for example. He took a certain type from Leonardo, his handling from time to time recalls the other masters--we have already referred to the most important of these--but had he studied in the school of one man, had he served an apprentices.h.i.+p after the fas.h.i.+on of his contemporaries, his pictures would surely have been free from those faults of composition and perspective that detract so much from the value of the big works. He seems to have been self-taught rather than to have been a schoolman. While his single figures are wholly admirable whether on fresco or on panel, his grouping is nearly always ineffective, one might say childish, and his sense of perspective is by no means equal to that of his greatest contemporaries. As a draughtsman and a colourist Luini had little to learn from anybody, and the poetry of his conceptions is best understood when it is remembered that he was a poet as well as a painter. 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 a.s.sociated 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 he saw around him. He may have idealised them, but they remain as they were made.
A few records of the prices paid for Luini's work exist among the doc.u.ments belonging to churches and religious houses, and while they justify a belief that at the time he came to Milan Luini had achieved some measure of distinction in his calling, they seem to prove that he was hardly regarded as a great painter. 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 young man who has not yet freed his own individuality from the influence of his elders. One of the most charming works a.s.sociated with this period is the ”Burial of St.
Catherine,” which is reproduced in these pages. The composition is simple enough, the handling does not touch the summit of the painter's later achievements, but the sentiment of the picture is quite delightful. St. Catherine is conceived in a spirit of deepest reverence and devotion, but the angels are just Lombardy peasant girls born to labour in the fields and now decorated with wings in honour of a great occasion. And yet the man who could paint this fresco and could show so unmistakably his own simple faith in the story it sets out, was a poet as well as a painter even though he had never written a line, while the treatment of his other contemporary frescoes and the fine feeling for appropriate colour suggest a great future for the artist who had not yet reached middle age. We see that Luini devoted his brush to mythological and sacred subjects, touching sacred history with a reverent hand, shutting his eyes to all that was painful, expressing all that was pitiful or calculated to strengthen the hold of religion upon the ma.s.s in fas.h.i.+on destined to appeal though in changing fas.h.i.+on for at least four centuries. 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 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. To-day one reaches Monza by the help of a steam-tram that blunders heavily enough over the wide flat Lombardy plain. The Milanese go to Monza for the sake of an outing, but most of the tourists who throng the city stay away, and it is possible to spend a few pleasant hours in the cathedral and churches with never a flutter of red-covered guide book to distract one's attention from the matters to which the hasty tourist is blind. Here Luini painted frescoes, and it is known that he stayed for a long time at the house of one of the strong men of Monza and painted a large number of frescoes there. To-day the fortress, if it was one, has become a farmhouse, and the frescoes, more than a dozen in all, have been taken away to the Royal Palace in Milan. Dr. Williamson in his interesting volume to which the student of Luini must be deeply indebted, says that there is one left at the Casa Pelucca. The writer in the course of two days spent in Monza was unfortunate enough to overlook it.
It has been stated that the facts relating to Luini's life are few and far between. Fiction on the other hand is plentiful, and there is a story that Luini, shortly after his arrival in Milan, was held responsible by the populace for the death of a priest who fell from a hastily erected scaffolding in the church of San Giorgio where the artist was working. The rest of the legend follows familiar lines that would serve the life story of any leading artist of the time, seeing that they all painted altar-pieces and used scaffolding. He is said to have fled to Monza, to have been received by the chief of the Pelucca family, to have paid for his protection with the frescoes that have now been brought from Monza to the Brera, to have fallen violently in love with the beautiful daughter of the house, to have engaged in heroic contests against great odds on her behalf, and so on, _ad absurdum_. 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 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. Maurizio, Santa Maria della Pace, Santa Maria di Brera, and St. Ambrosia.
[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE VI.--DETAIL OF FRESCO
(In the Brera, Milan)
This prettily posed figure is at the base of a fresco of the Virgin with Saints in the Brera. Part of the artist's signature (Bernardinus Louinus) may be seen below. It will be remembered that Carpaccio painted a very similar subject. The fresco is not too well preserved.]
In Milan he found a great patron, no less a man than Giovanni Bentivoglio who had been driven from his rule over Bologna by the ”Terrible Pontiff” Julius II., that life-long opponent and bitter enemy of the Borgia Pope Alexander VI. Alessandro Bentivoglio, the son of the ruined Giovanni, married Ippolita Sforza, daughter of one of the house that had done so much to rule Rome until Pope Alexander VI. broke its power. Alessandro Bentivoglio commissioned Luini to paint altar-pieces in St. Maurizio where his father was buried, and the painter included in his work a portrait of Ippolita Sforza with three female saints. He did much other work in this church; some of it has faded almost beyond recognition.
At the same time there is no need to think that we have recovered the last work of Luini or indeed of the great masters even in the churches of Italy. Only a few months ago the writer was in a small Italian church that had suffered a few years ago from disastrous floods. The water unable to find no outlet had risen for a time almost to the top of the supporting columns. The smooth wall above was plastered, and when the waters had subsided it was found that the plaster had become so damaged that it was necessary to remove it. Happily the work was done carefully, for under the whitewash some excellent frescoes were discovered. 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. Under similar conditions we may yet discover some of the earlier work of Luini, because it is clear that the years in which his reputation was in the making must have been full of achievement of which the greater part has now been lost. He could hardly have been less than thirty years of age when he came to Milan with a reputation sufficient to gain commissions for work in churches; that reputation must have taken years to acquire, and must have been a.s.sociated with very definite accomplishment. 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 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. On the other hand, painters who led the various movements of their time would be honoured by successive generations and their work would be stored in the best and safest places. To be sure, fire was never a respecter of palaces or persons, and the flames have consumed more work than a collection of the finest Renaissance pictures in existence could show, but even then the odds seem to be in favour of the bigger men because special efforts would be made to save their paintings while those of lesser men would be left with few regrets to take their chance.
When Luini was engaged to work in the Church of St. Maurizio there was a fair chance that his altar-pieces and frescoes would be well looked after, but when he worked for a small provincial family like the Pelucca the house sank with the family fortunes till at last it became a farm, and in the early years of the nineteenth century the frescoes were taken from the walls with as much care as was deemed advisable.
Doubtless Luini worked for many men whose worldly position was not as considerable as that of the Pelucca family, and that work may have disappeared altogether. The painter, as we have seen, did not enjoy the patronage of many great men before Alessandro Bentivoglio, and large inst.i.tutions were not numbered among his early clients. But he was not altogether without valuable patronage in the latter days, and in the early 'twenties of the sixteenth century the influential Brotherhood of the Holy Crown, one of the leading charitable inst.i.tutions of Milan, would seem to have given him some official connection with their inst.i.tution; a recognised position without fixed salary. For them he painted the magnificent frescoes now in the Ambrosian Library. The great work there was divided by the artist into three parts separated by pillars. In the centre Luini has depicted the crowning with thorns, Christ being seated upon a throne while thorns are being put upon His head; His arms are crossed; His expression one of supreme resignation. Above Him little angels look down or point to a cartouche on which is written ”Caput Regis Gloriae Spinis Coranatur.” In the left hand division of the fresco and on the right, the fore-ground is filled with kneeling figures whose heads are supposed to be portraits of the most prominent members of the Society.
Clearly they are all men who have achieved some measure of honour and distinction. Above the kneeling figures on the left hand side St. John is pointing out the tragedy of the central picture to the Virgin Mary, while on the right hand side a man in armour and another who is seen faintly behind him call the attention of a third to what is happening.
A crown of thorns hangs above the right and the left hand compartment and there is a landscape for background. It is recorded that this work took about six months, and was finished in March 1522 at a cost to the Society of 115 soldi. So Luini's work looks down to-day upon a part of the great Ambrosian Library, and it may well be that the library itself will yield to patient investigation some record, however simple, of the painter's life, sufficient perhaps to enable us to readjust our mental focus and see his lovable figure more clearly.
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