rdly any
deviation from his plan. The church is a long parallelogram, divided
into two unequal portions, the first and smaller for the public, the
second for the nuns. The walls are pierced with rounded and pilastered
windows, ten on each side, four of which belong to the outer and six to
the inner section. The dividing wall or septum rises to the point from
which the groinings of the roof spring; and round three sides of the
whole building, north, east, and south, runs a gallery for the use of
the convent. The altars of the inner and outer church are placed against
the septum, back to back, with certain differences of structure that
need not be described. Simple and severe, San Maurizio owes its
architectural beauty wholly and entirely to purity of line and
perfection of proportion. There is a prevailing spirit of repose, a
sense of space, fair, lightsome, and adapted to serene moods of the
meditative fancy in this building which is singularly at variance with
the religious mysticism and imaginative grandeur of a Gothic edifice.
The principal beauty of the church, however, is its tone of color. Every
square inch is covered with fresco or rich wood-work mellowed by time
into that harmony of tints which blends the work of greater and lesser
artists in one golden hue of brown. Round the arcades of the
convent-loggia run delicate arabesques with faces of fair female
saints--Catherine, Agnes, Lucy, Agatha--gem-like or star-like, gazing
from their gallery upon the church below. The Luinesque smile is on
their lips and in their eyes, quiet, refined, as though the emblems of
their martyrdom brought back no thought of pain to break the Paradise of
rest in which they dwell. There are twenty-six in all--a sisterhood of
stainless souls, the lilies of Love's garden planted round Christ's
throne. Soldier saints are mingled with them in still smaller rounds
above the windows, chosen to illustrate the virtues of an order which
renounced the world. To decide whose hand produced these masterpieces of
Lombard suavity and grace, or whether more than one, would not be easy.
Near the altar we can perhaps trace the style of Bartolommeo Suardi in
an Annunciation painted on the spandrils--that heroic style, large and
noble, known to us by the chivalrous St. Martin and the glorified
Madonna of the Brera frescos. It is not impossible that the male saints
of the loggia may be also his, though a tenderer touch, a something more
nearly Leonardesque