s
peculiar understanding of the power of black and white. But what signs
the picture inalienably as Moretto's own is the thought of the saint
himself, at the moment of his recovery from the stroke of Heaven. The
pure, pale, beardless face, in noble profile, might have had for its
immediate model some military monk of a later age, yet it breathes all
the joy and confidence of the Apostle who knows in a single flash of
time that he has found the veritable captain of his soul. It is indeed
the Paul whose genius of conviction has so greatly moved the minds of
men--the soldier who, bringing his prisoners "bound to Damascus," is
become the soldier of Jesus Christ.

Moretto's picture has found its place (in a dark recess, alas!) in the
Church of Santa Maria presso San Celso, in the suburbs of Milan, hard
by the site of the old Roman cemetery, where Ambrose, at a moment when
in one of his many conflicts a "sign" was needed, found the bodies of
Nazarus and Celsus, youthful patrician martyrs in the reign of Nero,
overflowing now with miraculous powers, their blood still fresh upon
them--conspersa recenti sanguine. The body of Saint Nazarus he removed
into the city: that of Saint Celsus remained within the little
sanctuary [93] which still bears his name, and beside which, in the
fifteenth century, arose the glorious Church of the Madonna, with
spacious atrium after the Ambrosian manner, a facade richly sculptured
in the style of the Renaissance, and sumptuously adorned within.
Behind the massive silver tabernacle of the altar of the miraculous
picture which gave its origin to this splendid building, the rare
visitor, peeping as into some sacred bird-nest, detects one of the
loveliest works of Luini, a small, but exquisitely finished "Holy
Family." Among the fine pictures around are works by two other very
notable religious painters of the cinque-cento. Both alike, Ferrari
and Borgognone, may seem to have introduced into fiery Italian
latitudes a certain northern temperature, and somewhat twilight,
French, or Flemish, or German, thoughts. Ferrari, coming from the
neighbourhood of Varallo, after work at Vercelli and Novara, returns
thither to labour, as both sculptor and painter, in the "stations" of
the Sacro Monte, at a form of religious art which would seem to have
some natural kinship with the temper of a mountain people. It is as if
the living actors in the "Passion Play" of Oberammergau had been
transformed into almo