, S. Maurizio owes its architectural beauty wholly and entirely
to purity of line and perfection of proportion. There is a prevailing
spirit of repose, a sense of space, fair, lightsome, and adapted
to serene moods of the meditative fancy in this building, which is
singularly at variance with the religious mysticism and imaginative
grandeur of a Gothic edifice. The principal beauty of the church,
however, is its tone of colour. Every square inch is covered with
fresco or rich woodwork, mellowed by time into that harmony of tints
which blends the work of greater and lesser artists in one golden
hue of brown. Round the arcades of the convent-loggia run delicate
arabesques with faces of fair female saints--Catherine, Agnes, Lucy,
Agatha,--gem-like or star-like, gazing from their gallery upon the
church below. The Luinesque smile is on their lips and in their eyes,
quiet, refined, as though the emblems of their martyrdom brought back
no thought of pain to break the Paradise of rest in which they dwell.
There are twenty-six in all, a sisterhood of stainless souls, the
lilies of Love's garden planted round Christ's throne. Soldier saints
are mingled with them in still smaller rounds above the windows,
chosen to illustrate the virtues of an order which renounced the
world. To decide whose hand produced these masterpieces of Lombard
suavity and grace, or whether more than one, would not be easy. Near
the altar we can perhaps trace the style of Bartolommeo Suardi in an
Annunciation painted on the spandrils--that heroic style, large and
noble, known to us by the chivalrous S. Martin and the glorified
Madonna of the Brera frescoes. It is not impossible that the male
saints of the loggia may be also his, though a tenderer touch, a
something more nearly Lionardesque in its quietude, must be discerned
in Lucy and her sisters. The whole of the altar in this inner church
belongs to Luini. Were it not for darkness and decay, we should
pronounce this series of the Passion in nine great compositions, with
saints and martyrs and torch-bearing genii, to be one of his most
ambitious and successful efforts. As it is, we can but judge in part;
the adolescent beauty of Sebastian, the grave compassion of S.
Rocco, the classical perfection of the cupid with lighted tapers, the
gracious majesty of women smiling on us sideways from their Lombard
eyelids--these remain to haunt our memory, emerging from the shadows
of the vault above.

The inner chu