episode when Catherine is about to
be beheaded. The executioner has raised his sword to strike. She, robed
in brocade of black and gold, so cut as to display the curve of neck
and back, while the bosom is covered, leans her head above her praying
hands, and waits the blow in sweetest resignation. Two soldiers stand at
some distance in a landscape of hill and meadow; and far up are seen the
angels carrying her body to its tomb upon Mount Sinai. I cannot find
words or summon courage to describe the beauty of this picture--its
atmosphere of holy peace, the dignity of its composition, the golden
richness of its coloring. The most tragic situation has here again been
alchemized by Luini's magic into a pure idyl, without the loss of power,
without the sacrifice of edification.

St. Catherine, in this incomparable fresco, is a portrait, the history
of which so strikingly illustrates the relation of the arts to religion
on the one hand, and to life on the other, in the age of the
Renaissance, that it cannot be omitted. At the end of his fourth
Novella, having related the life of the Contessa di Cellant, Bandello
says: "And so the poor woman was beheaded; such was the end of her
unbridled desires; and he who would fain see her painted to the life,
let him go to the Church of the Monastero Maggiore, and there will he
behold her portrait." The Contessa di Cellant was the only child of a
rich usurer who lived at Casal Monferrato. Her mother was a Greek; and
she was a girl of such exquisite beauty that, in spite of her low
origin, she became the wife of the noble Ermes Visconti in her sixteenth
year. He took her to live with him at Milan, where she frequented the
house of the Bentivogli, but none other. Her husband told Bandello that
he knew her temper better than to let her visit with the freedom of the
Milanese ladies. Upon his death, while she was little more than twenty,
she retired to Casale and led a gay life among many lovers. One of
these, the Count of Cellant in the Val d'Aosta, became her second
husband, conquered by her extraordinary loveliness. They could not,
however, agree together. She left him, and established herself at Pavia.
Rich with her father's wealth and still of most seductive beauty, she
now abandoned herself to a life of profligacy. Three among her lovers
must be named: Ardizzino Valperga, Count of Masino; Roberto Sanseverino,
of the princely Naples family; and Don Pietro di Cardona, a Sicilian.
With each o