miniaturist; Beltraffio,
hard brilliancy of light and colour; Cesare da Sesto, somewhat of
effeminate sweetness; and thus the qualities of many men emerge, to blend
themselves again in what is Lionardo's own. It is surely not without
significance that this metempsychosis of genius should have happened in
the case of Lionardo, himself the magician of Renaissance art, the lover
of all things double-natured and twin-souled.

Two painters of the Lombard school, Bernardino Luini and Gaudenzio
Ferrari, demand separate notice. Without Lionardo it is difficult to say
what Luini would have been: so thoroughly did he appropriate his teacher's
type of face, and, in oil-painting, his refinement. And yet Luini stands
on his own ground, in no sense an imitator, with a genius more simple and
idyllic than Da Vinci's. Little conception of his charm can be formed by
those who have not seen his frescoes in the Brera and S. Maurizio Maggiore
at Milan, in the church of the Angeli at Lugano, or in the pilgrimage
church of Saronno. To the circumstance of his having done his best work in
places hardly visited until of late years, may in part perhaps be
attributed the tardy recognition of a painter eminently fitted to be
popular. Luini was essentially a fresco-painter. None, perhaps, of all the
greatest Italian _frescanti_ realised a higher quality of brilliancy
without gaudiness, by the scale of colours he selected and by the purity
with which he used them in simple combinations. His frescoes are never
dull or heavy in tone, never glaring, never thin or chalky. He knew how to
render them both luminous and rich, without falling into the extremes that
render fresco-paintings often less attractive than oil-pictures. His
feeling for loveliness of form was original and exquisite. The joy of
youth found in Luini an interpreter only less powerful and even more
tender than in Raphael. While he shared with the Venetians their
sensibility to nature, he had none of their sensuousness or love of pomp.
In idyllic painting of a truly great type I know of nothing more
delightful than his figures of young musicians going to the marriage feast
of Mary, nothing more graceful than the genius ivy-crowned and seated at
the foot of the cross.[389] The sentiment for naive and artless grace, so
fully possessed by Luini, gave freshness to his treatment of conventional
religious themes. Under his touch they appeal immediately to the most
untutored taste, without the ai