n of the
Magi" and the "Purification of the Virgin," two of Luini's divinest
frescos. Above them in lunettes are four Evangelists and four Latin
Fathers, with four Sibyls. Time and neglect have done no damage here;
and here, again, perforce we notice perfect mastery of color in fresco.
The blues detach themselves too much, perhaps, from the rest of the
coloring; and that is all a devil's advocate could say. It is possible
that the absence of blue makes the St. Catherine frescos in the
Monastero Maggiore at Milan surpass all other works of Luini. But
nowhere else has he shown more beauty and variety in detail than here.
The group of women led by Joseph, the shepherd carrying the lamb upon
his shoulder, the girl with a basket of white doves, the child with an
apple on the altar-steps, the lovely youth in the foreground heedless of
the scene; all these are idyllic incidents treated with the purest, the
serenest, the most spontaneous, the truest, most instinctive sense of
beauty. The landscape includes a view of Saronno, and an episodical
picture of the "Flight into Egypt," where a white-robed angel leads the
way. All these lovely things are in the "Purification," which is dated
_Bernardinus Lovinus pinxit_, MDXXV.

The fresco of the "Magi" is less notable in detail, and in general
effect is more spoiled by obtrusive blues. There is, however, one young
man of wholly Leonardesque loveliness, whose divine innocence of
adolescence, unalloyed by serious thought, unstirred by passions, almost
forces a comparison with Sodoma. The only painter who approaches Luini
in what may be called the Lombard, to distinguish it from the Venetian
idyl, is Sodoma; and the work of his which comes nearest to Luini's
masterpieces is the legend of St. Benedict, at Monte Oliveto, near
Siena. Yet Sodoma had not all Luini's innocence or _naivete_. If he
added something slightly humorous which has an indefinite charm, he
lacked that freshness, as of "cool, meek-blooded flowers" and boyish
voices, which fascinates us in Luini. Sodoma was closer to the earth,
and feared not to impregnate what he saw of beauty with the fiercer
passions of his nature. If Luini had felt passion who shall say? It
appears nowhere in his work, where life is toned to a religious
joyousness. When Shelley compared the poetry of the Theocritean
amourists to the perfume of the tuberose, and that of the earlier Greek
poets to "a meadow-gale of June, which mingles the fragrance of al