much exquisite church-music there,
violins and the like, on that perfectly silent afternoon--such music as
he may still really hear on Sundays at the neighbouring town of Novara,
famed for it from of old. Here, again, the art of Gaudenzio Ferrari
reigns. Gaudenzio! It is the name of the saintly prelate on whom his
pencil was many times employed, First Bishop of Novara, and patron of
the magnificent basilica hard by which still covers his body, whose
earthly presence in cope and mitre Ferrari has commemorated in the
altar-piece of the "Marriage of St. Catherine," with its refined
richness of colour, like a bank of real flowers blooming there, and
like nothing else around it in the [96] vast duomo of old Roman
architecture, now heavily masked in modern stucco. The solemn
mountains, under the closer shadow of which his genius put on a
northern hue, are far away, telling at Novara only as the grandly
theatrical background to an entirely lowland life. And here, as at
Vercelli so at Novara, Ferrari is not less graciously Italian than
Luini himself.

If the name of Luini's master, Borgognone, is no proof of northern
extraction, a northern temper is nevertheless a marked element of his
genius--something of the patience, especially, of the masters of Dijon
or Bruges, nowhere more clearly than in the two groups of male and
female heads in the National Gallery, family groups, painted in the
attitude of worship, with a lowly religious sincerity which may remind
us of the contemporary work of M. Legros. Like those northern masters,
he accepts piously, but can refine, what "has no comeliness." And yet
perhaps no painter has so adequately presented that purely personal
beauty (for which, indeed, even profane painters for the most part have
seemed to care very little) as Borgognone in the two deacons, Stephen
and Laurence, who, in one of the altar-pieces of the Certosa, assist at
the throne of Syrus, ancient, sainted, First Bishop of Pavia--stately
youths in quite imperial dalmatics of black and gold. An indefatigable
worker at many forms of religious art, here and elsewhere, assisting at
last in the [97] carving and inlaying of the rich marble facade of the
Certosa, the rich carved and inlaid wood-work of Santa Maria at
Bergamo, he is seen perhaps at his best, certainly in his most
significantly religious mood, in the Church of the Incoronata at Lodi,
especially in one picture there, the "Presentation of Christ in the
Temple."