elf-restraint in his
colouring which corresponds to the reserve of his emotion; and though
a regret sometimes rises in our mind that he should have modelled the
light and shade upon his faces with a brusque, unpleasing hardness,
their pallor dwells within our memory as something delicately sought
if not consummately attained. In a word, Borgognone was a true Lombard
of the best time. The very imperfection of his flesh-painting repeats
in colour what the greatest Lombard sculptors sought in stone--a
sharpness of relief that passes over into angularity. This brusqueness
was the counterpoise to tenderness of feeling and intensity of fancy
in these northern artists. Of all Borgognone's pictures in the Certosa
I should select the altar-piece of S. Siro with S. Lawrence and S.
Stephen and two Fathers of the Church, for its fusion of this master's
qualities.

The Certosa is a wilderness of lovely workmanship. From Borgognone's
majesty we pass into the quiet region of Luini's Christian grace, or
mark the influence of Lionardo on that rare Assumption of Madonna by
his pupil, Andrea Solari. Like everything touched by the Lionardesque
spirit, this great picture was left unfinished: yet Northern Italy
has nothing finer to show than the landscape, outspread in its
immeasurable purity of calm, behind the grouped Apostles and the
ascendant Mother of Heaven. The feeling of that happy region between
the Alps and Lombardy, where there are many waters--_et tacitos sine
labe laous sine murmure rivos_--and where the last spurs of the
mountains sink in undulations to the plain, has passed into this azure
vista, just as all Umbria is suggested in a twilight background of
young Raphael or Perugino.

The portraits of the Dukes of Milan and their families carry us into
a very different realm of feeling. Medallions above the doors of
sacristy and chancel, stately figures reared aloft beneath gigantic
canopies, men and women slumbering with folded hands upon their marble
biers--we read in all those sculptured forms a strange record of human
restlessness, resolved into the quiet of the tomb. The iniquities of
Gian Galeazzo Visconti, _il gran Biscione_, the blood-thirst
of Gian Maria, the dark designs of Filippo and his secret vices,
Francesco Sforza's treason, Galeazzo Maria's vanities and lusts;
their tyrants' dread of thunder and the knife; their awful deaths by
pestilence and the assassin's poignard; their selfishness, oppression,
cruelty and