proof were needed after inspection of the altar-piece in our
National Gallery, that he was one of the most powerful and original
painters of Italy, blending the repose of the earlier masters and their
consummate workmanship with a profound sensibility to the finest shades
of feeling and the rarest forms of natural beauty. He selected an
exquisite type of face for his young men and women; on his old men he
bestowed singular gravity and dignity. His saints are a society of
strong, pure, restful, earnest souls, in whom the passion of deepest
emotion is transfigured by habitual calm. The brown and golden harmonies
he loved are gained without sacrifice of lustre: there is a
self-restraint in his coloring which corresponds to the reserve of his
emotion; and though a regret sometimes rises in our mind that he should
have modelled the light and shade upon his faces with a brusque,
unpleasing hardness, their pallor dwells within our memory as something
delicately sought if not consummately attained. In a word, Borgognone
was a true Lombard of the best time. The very imperfection of his
flesh-painting repeats in color what the greatest Lombard sculptors
sought in stone--a sharpness of relief that passes over into angularity.
This brusqueness was the counter-poise to tenderness of feeling and
intensity of fancy in these Northern artists. Of all Borgognone's
pictures in the Certosa, I should select the altar-piece of St. Siro
with St. Lawrence and St. Stephen and two fathers of the Church, for its
fusion of this master's qualities.

The Certosa is a wilderness of lovely workmanship. From Borgognone's
majesty we pass into the quiet region of Luini's Christian grace, or
mark the influence of Leonardo on that rare Assumption of Madonna by his
pupil, Andrea Solari. Like everything touched by the Leonardesque
spirit, this great picture was left unfinished; yet Northern Italy has
nothing finer to show than the landscape, outspread in its immeasurable
purity of calm, behind the grouped Apostles and the ascendent Mother of
Heaven. The feeling of that happy region between the Alps and Lombardy,
where there are many waters--_et tacitos sine labe lacus sine murmure
rivos_--and where the last spurs of the mountains sink in undulations
to the plain, has passed into this azure vista, just as all Umbria is
suggested in a twilight background of young Raphael or Perugino.

The portraits of the dukes of Milan and their families carry us into a
very