in the second grade and Luini never quite survived his early devotion to their methods, often making the fatal mistake of covering a large canvas with many figures of varying size but equal value. It may be remarked that Tintoretto was the first great painter of the Renaissance who learned to subordinate parts to the whole, and he had to face a great deal of unpopularity because he saw with his own eyes instead of using those of his predecessors.

It may be suggested, with all possible respect to those who hold different opinions, that Luini, though he responded to certain influences, had no master in the generally accepted sense of the term. One cannot trace the definite relation between him and any older painter that we find between Titian and Gian Bellini, for example. He took a certain type from Leonardo, his handling from time to time recalls the other masters—we have already referred to the most important of these—but had he studied in the school of one man, had he served an apprenticeship after the fashion of his contemporaries, his pictures would surely have been free from those faults of composition and perspective that detract so much from the value of the big works. He seems to have been self-taught rather than to have been a schoolman. While his single figures are wholly admirable whether on fresco or on panel, his grouping is nearly always ineffective, one might say childish, and his sense of perspective is by no means equal to that of his greatest contemporaries. As a draughtsman and a colourist Luini had little to learn from anybody, and the poetry of his conceptions is best understood when it is remembered that he was a poet as well as a painter. He is said to have written poems and essays, though we are not in a position to say where they are to be found, and it is clear that he had a singularly detached spirit and that the hand of a skilled painter was associated with the mind of a little child. In some aspects he is as simple as those primitive painters of Umbria whose backgrounds are all of gold. Like so many other painters of the Renaissance Luini’s saints and angels are peasant folk, the people he saw around him. He may have idealised them, but they remain as they were made.

A few records of the prices paid for Luini’s work exist among the documents belonging to churches and religious houses, and while they justify a belief that at the time he came to Milan Luini had achieved some measure of distinction in his calling, they seem to prove that he was hardly regarded as a great painter. The prices paid to him are ridiculously small, no more than a living wage, but he had the reputation of being a reliable and painstaking artist and he would seem to have been content with a small reward for work that appealed to him. His early commissions executed in and around Milan when he first came from Luini were numerous and consisted very largely of frescoes which are the work of a young man who has not yet freed his own individuality from the influence of his elders. One of the most charming works associated with this period is the “Burial of St. Catherine,” which is reproduced in these pages. The composition is simple enough, the handling does not touch the summit of the painter’s later achievements, but the sentiment of the picture is quite delightful. St. Catherine is conceived in a spirit of deepest reverence and devotion, but the angels are just Lombardy peasant girls born to labour in the fields and now decorated with wings in honour of a great occasion. And yet the man who could paint this fresco and could show so unmistakably his own simple faith in the story it sets out, was a poet as well as a painter even though he had never written a line, while the treatment of his other contemporary frescoes and the fine feeling for appropriate colour suggest a great future for the artist who had not yet reached middle age. We see that Luini devoted his brush to mythological and sacred subjects, touching sacred history with a reverent hand, shutting his eyes to all that was painful, expressing all that was pitiful or calculated to strengthen the hold of religion upon the mass in fashion destined to appeal though in changing fashion for at least four centuries. Where the works have failed to triumph as expressions of a living faith they have charmed agnostics as an expression of enduring beauty.

From Milan Luini seems to have gone to Monza, a city a few miles away from the capital of Lombardy where the rulers of united Italy come after their coronation to receive the iron crown that has been worn by the kings of Lombardy for nearly a thousand years. This is the city in which the late King Umberto, that brave and good man, was foully murdered by an anarchist. To-day one reaches Monza by the help of a steam-tram that blunders heavily enough over the wide flat Lombardy plain. The Milanese go to Monza for the sake of an outing, but most of the tourists who throng the city stay away, and it is possible to spend a few pleasant hours in the cathedral and churches with never a flutter of red-covered guide book to distract one’s attention from the matters to which the hasty tourist is blind. Here Luini painted frescoes, and it is known that he stayed for a long time at the house of one of the strong men of Monza and painted a large number of frescoes there. To-day the fortress, if it was one, has become a farmhouse, and the frescoes, more than a dozen in all, have been taken away to the Royal Palace in Milan. Dr. Williamson in his interesting volume to which the student of Luini must be deeply indebted, says that there is one left at the Casa Pelucca. The writer in the course of two days spent in Monza was unfortunate enough to overlook it.

It has been stated that the facts relating to Luini’s life are few and far between. Fiction on the other hand is plentiful, and there is a story that Luini, shortly after his arrival in Milan, was held responsible by the populace for the death of a priest who fell from a hastily erected scaffolding in the church of San Giorgio where the artist was working. The rest of the legend follows familiar lines that would serve the life story of any leading artist of the time, seeing that they all painted altar-pieces and used scaffolding. He is said to have fled to Monza, to have been received by the chief of the Pelucca family, to have paid for his protection with the frescoes that have now been brought from Monza to the Brera, to have fallen violently in love with the beautiful daughter of the house, to have engaged in heroic contests against great odds on her behalf, and so on, ad absurdum. If we look at the portraits the painter is said to have made of himself and to have placed in pictures at Saronna and elsewhere we shall see that Luini was hardly the type of man to have engaged in the idle pursuits of chivalry in the intervals of the work to which his life was given. We have the head of a man of thought