after vague supposititious
alliances--something between Titian and Rubens! Certainly, Romanino's
bold, contrasted colouring anticipates something of the northern
freshness of Rubens. But while the peculiarity of the work of Rubens
is a sense of momentary transition, as if the colours were even now
melting in it, Romanino's canvas bears rather the steady glory of broad
Italian noonday; while he is distinguished also for a remarkable
clearness of [101] design, which has perhaps something to do, is
certainly congruous with, a markedly religious sentiment, like that of
Angelico or Perugino, lingering still in the soul of this Brescian
painter towards the middle of the sixteenth century.

Romanino and Moretto, the two great masters of Brescia in successive
generations, both alike inspired above all else by the majesty, the
majestic beauty, of religion--its persons, its events, every
circumstance that belongs to it--are to be seen in friendly rivalry,
though with ten years' difference of age between them, in the Church of
San Giovanni Evangelista; Romanino approaching there, as near as he
might, in a certain candle-lighted scene, to that harmony in black,
white, and grey preferred by the younger painter. Before this or that
example of Moretto's work, in that admirably composed picture of Saint
Paul's Conversion, for instance, you might think of him as but a very
noble designer in grisaille. A more detailed study would convince you
that, whatever its component elements, there is a very complex tone
which almost exclusively belongs to him; the "Saint Ursula" finally,
that he is a great, though very peculiar colourist--a lord of colour
who, while he knows the colour resources that may lie even in black and
white, has really included every delicate hue whatever in that faded
"silver grey," which yet lingers in one's memory as their final effect.
For some admirers indeed he is definable [102] as a kind of really
sanctified Titian. It must be admitted, however, that whereas Titian
sometimes lost a little of himself in the greatness of his designs, or
committed their execution, in part, to others, Moretto, in his work, is
always all there--thorough, steady, even, in his workmanship. That,
again, was a result of his late-surviving religious conscience. And
here, as in other instances, the supposed influence of the greater
master is only a supposition. As a matter of fact, at least in his
earlier life, Moretto made no visit to