omanino's own namesake--neither more nor less than the familiar,
self-tormenting anchorite; for few painters (Bellini, to some degree,
in his picture of the saint's study) have perceived the rare pictorial
opportunities of Jerome; Jerome with the true cradle of the Lord, first
of Christian antiquaries, author of the fragrant Vulgate version of the
[106] Scriptures. Alessandro and Jerome support the Mother and the
Child in the central place. But the loveliest subjects of this fine
group of compositions are in the corners above, half-length, life-sized
figures--Gaudioso, Bishop of Brescia, above Saint Jerome; above
Alessandro, Saint Filippo Benizzi, meek founder of the Order of
Servites to which that church at Brescia belonged, with his lily, and
in the right hand a book; and what a book! It was another very
different painter, Giuseppe Caletti, of Cremona, who, for the truth and
beauty of his drawing of them, gained the title of the "Painter of
Books." But if you wish to see what can be made of the leaves, the
vellum cover, of a book, observe that in Saint Philip's hand.--The
writer? the contents? you ask: What may they be? and whence did it
come?--out of embalmed sacristy, or antique coffin of some early
Brescian martyr, or, through that bright space of blue Italian sky,
from the hands of an angel, like his Annunciation lily, or the book
received in the Apocalypse by John the Divine? It is one of those old
saints, Gaudioso (at home in every church in Brescia), who looks out
with full face from the opposite corner of the altar-piece, from a
background which, though it might be the new heaven over a new earth,
is in truth only the proper, breathable air of Italy. As we see him
here, Saint Gaudioso is one of the more exquisite treasures of our
National Gallery. It was thus that at the magic [107] touch of
Romanino's art the dim, early, hunted-down Brescian church of the
primitive centuries, crushed into the dust, it might seem, was "brought
to her king," out of those old dark crypts, "in raiment of
needle-work"--the delicate, richly folded, pontifical white vestments,
the mitre and staff and gloves, and rich jewelled cope, blue or green.
The face, of remarkable beauty after a type which all feel though it is
actually rare in art, is probably a portrait of some distinguished
churchman of Romanino's own day; a second Gaudioso, perhaps, setting
that later Brescian church to rights after the terrible French
occupation in