The experienced visitor knows what to expect in the sacristies
of the great Italian churches; the smaller, choicer works of Luini,
say, of Della Robbia or Mino of Fiesole, the superb ambries and drawers
and presses of old oak or cedar, the still untouched morsel of
fresco--like sacred priestly thoughts visibly lingering there in the
half-light. Well! the little octagonal Church of the Incoronata is
like one of these sacristies. The work of Bramante--you see it, as it
is so rarely one's luck to do, with its furniture and internal
decoration complete and unchanged, the coloured pavement, the colouring
which covers the walls, the elegant little organ of Domenico da Lucca
(1507), the altar-screens with their dainty rows of brass cherubs. In
Borgognone's picture of the "Presentation," there the place is,
essentially as we see it to-day. The ceremony, invested with all the
sentiment of a Christian sacrament, takes place in this very church,
this "Temple" of the Incoronata where you are standing, reflected on
the dimly glorious wall, as in a mirror. Borgognone in his picture has
[98] but added in long legend, letter by letter, on the fascia below
the cupola, the Song of Simeon.

The Incoronata however is, after all, the monument less of Ambrogio
Borgognone than of the gifted Piazza family:--Callisto, himself born at
Lodi, his father, his uncle, his brothers, his son Fulvio, working
there in three generations, under marked religious influence, and with
so much power and grace that, quite gratuitously, portions of their
work have been attributed to the master-hand of Titian, in some
imaginary visit here to these painters, who were in truth the disciples
of another--Romanino of Brescia. At Lodi, the lustre of Scipione
Piazza is lost in that of Callisto, his elder brother; but he might
worthily be included in a list of painters memorable for a single
picture, such pictures as the solemn Madonna of Pierino del Vaga, in
the Duomo of Pisa, or the Holy Family of Pellegrino Piola, in the
Goldsmiths' Street at Genoa. A single picture, a single figure in a
picture, signed and dated, over the altar of Saint Clement, in the
Church of San Spirito, at Bergamo, might preserve the fame of Scipione
Piazza, who did not live to be old. The figure is that of the youthful
Clement of Rome himself, "who had seen the blessed Apostles," writing
at the dictation of Saint Paul. For a moment he looks away from the
letters of the book with all the