our reach at present. His appeal is so irresistible, the beauty of his work is so rare and so enduring that we must endeavour to the best of our ability, however small it be, to declare his praise, to stimulate inquiry, enlarge his circle, and give him the place that belongs to him of right. There are painters in plenty whose work is admired and praised, whose claims we acknowledge instantly while admitting to ourselves that we should not care to live with their pictures hanging on round us. The qualities of cleverness and brilliance pall after a little time, the mere conquest of technical difficulties of the kind that have been self-inflicted rouses admiration for a while and then leaves us cold. But the man who is the happy possessor of a fresco or a panel picture by Luini is to be envied. Even he who lives in the neighbourhood of some gallery or church and only sees the rare master’s works where, “blackening in the daily candle smoke, they moulder on the damp wall’s travertine,” will never tire of Luini’s company. He will always find inspiration, encouragement, or consolation in the reflection of the serene and beautiful outlook upon life that gave the work so much of its enduring merit. Luini, whatever manner of man he may have been, was so clearly enamoured of beauty, so clearly intolerant of what is ugly and unrefined, that he shrank from all that was coarse and revolting either in the life around him or in certain aspects of the Bible stories that gave him subjects for his brush. Beauty and simplicity were the objects of his unceasing search, his most exquisite expression.

Like all other great painters he had his marked periods of development, his best work was done in the last years of his life, but there is nothing mean or trivial in any picture that he painted and this is the more to his credit because we know from the documents existing to-day that he lived in the world and not in the cloister. We admire the perennial serenity of Beato Angelico, we rejoice with him in his exquisite religious visions. The peaceful quality of his painting and the happy certainty of his faith move us to the deepest admiration, but we may not forget that Angelico lived from the time when he was little more than a boy to the years when he was an old man in the untroubled atmosphere of the monastery of San Marco in Florence, that whether he was at home in that most favoured city or working in the Vatican at Rome, he had no worldly troubles. Honour, peace, and a mind at peace with the world were with him always.

Bernardino Luini on the other hand travelled from one town in Italy to another, employed by religious houses from time to time, but always as an artist who could be relied upon to do good work cheaply. He could not have been rich, he could hardly have been famous, it is even reasonable to suppose that his circumstances were straitened, and on this account the unbroken serenity of his work and his faithful devotion to beauty are the more worthy of our praise. What was beautiful in his life and work came from within, not from without, and perhaps because he was a stranger to the cloistered seclusion that made Fra Angelico’s life so pleasantly uneventful his work shows certain elements of strength that are lacking from the frescoes that adorn the walls of San Marco to this day. To his contemporaries he was no more than a little planet wandering at will round those fixed stars of the first magnitude that lighted all the world of art. Now some of those great stars have lost their light and the little planet shines as clear as Hesperus.

II

As we have said already nothing is known of Luini’s early life, although the fact that he was born at Luino on the Lago Maggiore seems to be beyond dispute. The people of that little lake side town have no doubt at all about the matter, and they say that the family was one of some distinction, that Giacomo of Luino who founded a monastery in his native place was the painter’s uncle. Perhaps the wish was father to the thought, and because every man who sets out to study the life and work of an artist is as anxious to know as was Miss Rosa Dartle herself, there are always facts of a sort at his service. He who seeks the truth can always be supplied with something as much like it as paste is to diamonds, and can supplement the written word with the aid of tradition. The early life of the artist is a blank, and the authorities are by no means in agreement about the year of his birth. 1470 would seem to be a reasonable date, with a little latitude on either side. Many men writing long years after the painter’s death, have held that he was a pupil of Leonardo da Vinci, indeed several pictures that were attributed to da Vinci by the authorities of different European galleries are now recognised as Luini’s work, but the mistake is not at all difficult to explain. If we turn to “La Joconda,” a portrait by da Vinci that hangs in the Louvre to-day, and is apparently beyond dispute in the eyes of the present generation of critics, and then go through the Brera in Milan with a photograph of “La Joconda’s” portrait in our hand, it will be impossible to overlook the striking resemblance between Luini’s types and da Vinci’s smiling model. Leonardo had an academy in Milan, and it is reasonable to suppose that Luini worked in it, although at the time when he is supposed to have come for the first time to the capital of Lombardy, Leonardo da Vinci had left, apparently because Louis XII. of France, cousin and successor of that Charles VIII. who had troubled the peace of Italy for so long, was thundering at the city gates, and at such a time great artists were apt to remember that they had good patrons elsewhere. The school may, however, have remained open because no great rulers made war on artists, and Luini would have learned something of the spirit that animated Leonardo’s pictures. For other masters and influence he seems to have gone to Bramantino and Foppa. Bramantino was a painter of Milan and Ambrosio Foppa known as Caradosso was a native of Pavia and should not be reckoned among Milanese artists as he has so often been. He was renowned for the beauty of his medals and his goldsmith’s work; and he was one of the men employed by the great family of Bentivoglio.

It may be mentioned in this place that many Italian artists, particularly those of the Florentine schools, suffered very greatly from their unceasing devotion to the art of the miniaturist. They sought to achieve his detail, his fine but cramped handling, and this endeavour was fatal to them when they came to paint large pictures that demanded skilled composition, and the subordination of detail to a large general effect. The influence of the miniature painter and the maker of medals kept many a fifteenth-century painter