ollaborators. But it is none the less certain that the keynote of the
whole music is struck by them. Amadeo, the master of the Colleoni chapel
at Bergamo, was both sculptor and architect. If the facade of the
Certosa be not absolutely his creation, he had a hand in the
distribution of its masses and the detail of its ornaments. The only
fault in this otherwise faultless product of the purest quattrocento
inspiration is that the facade is a frontispiece, with hardly any
structural relation to the church it masks; and this, though serious
from the point of view of architecture, is no abatement of its
sculpturesque and picturesque refinement. At first sight it seems a
wilderness of loveliest reliefs and statues--of angel faces, fluttering
raiment, flowing hair, love-laden youths, and stationary figures of
grave saints, mid wayward tangles of acanthus and wild vine and
cupid-laden foliage; but the subordination of these decorative details
to the main design--clear, rhythmical, and lucid, like a chant of
Pergolese or Stradella--will enrapture one who has the sense for unity
evoked from divers elements, for thought subduing all caprices to the
harmony of beauty. It is not possible elsewhere in Italy to find the
instinct of the earlier Renaissance, so amorous in its expenditure of
rare material, so lavish in its bestowal of the costliest workmanship
on ornamental episodes, brought into truer keeping with a pure and
simple structural effect.

All the great sculptor-architects of Lombardy worked in succession on
this miracle of beauty; and this may account for the sustained
perfection of style, which nowhere suffers from the languor of
exhaustion in the artist or from repetition of motives. It remains the
triumph of North Italian genius, exhibiting qualities of tenderness and
self-abandonment to inspiration which we lack in the severer
masterpieces of the Tuscan school.

To Borgognone is assigned the painting of the roof in nave and
choir--exceeding rich, varied, and withal in sympathy with stately
Gothic style. Borgognone, again, is said to have designed the saints and
martyrs worked in _tarsia_ for the choir-stalls. His frescos are in some
parts well preserved, as in the lovely little Madonna at the end of the
south chapel, while the great fresco above the window in the south
transept has an historical value that renders it interesting in spite of
partial decay. Borgognone's oil-pictures throughout the church prove, if
such