What Ferrari possessed was rapidity of movement, fulness and richness
of reality, exuberance of invention, excellent portraiture, dramatic
vehemence, and an almost unrivalled sympathy with the swift and
passionate world of angels. What he lacked was power of composition,
simplicity of total effect, harmony in colouring, control over his
own luxuriance, the sense of tranquillity. He seems to have sought
grandeur in size and multitude, richness, eclat, contrast. Being the
disciple of Lionardo and Raphael, his defects are truly singular. As
a composer, the old leaven of Giovenone remained in him; but he felt
the dramatic tendencies of a later age, and in occasional episodes he
realised them with a force and _furia_ granted to very few of the
Italian painters.

LANINI AT VERCELLI

The Casa Mariano is a palace which belonged to a family of that name.
Like many houses of the sort in Italy, it fell to vile uses; and
its hall of audience was turned into a lumber-room. The Operai of
Vercelli, I was told, bought the palace a few years ago, restored the
noble hall, and devoted a smaller room to a collection of pictures
valuable for students of the early Vercellese style of painting. Of
these there is no need to speak. The great hall is the gem of the Casa
Mariano. It has a coved roof, with a large flat oblong space in
the centre of the ceiling. The whole of this vault and the lunettes
beneath were painted by Lanini; so runs the tradition of the
fresco-painter's name; and though much injured by centuries of
outrage, and somewhat marred by recent restoration, these frescoes
form a precious monument of Lombard art. The object of the painter's
design seems to have been the glorification of Music. In the central
compartment of the roof is an assembly of the gods, obviously borrowed
from Raphael's 'Marriage of Cupid and Psyche' in the Farnesina
at Rome. The fusion of Roman composition with Lombard execution
constitutes the chief charm of this singular work, and makes it, so
far as I am aware, unique. Single figures of the goddesses, and the
whole movement of the scene upon Olympus, are transcribed without
attempt at concealment. And yet the fresco is not a barefaced copy.
The manner of feeling and of execution is quite different from that of
Raphael's school. The poetry and sentiment are genuinely Lombard. None
of Raphael's pupils could have carried out his design with a delicacy
of emotion and a technical skill in colouring so consu