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It may be urged that for those of us who are content to see with the spiritual eye Luini is expressed more eloquently by his work, and particularly by this great picture in the Ambrosian Library, than he could hope to be by the combined efforts of half-a-dozen critics, each with his own special point of view and his properly profound contempt for the views of others. The painter’s low tones and subtle harmonies, his pure but limited vision, speak to us of a gentle, refined, and delicate nature, of an achievement that stopped short of cleverness and consequently limited him to the quieter byways of artistic life, while those whose inspiration was less, and whose gifts were more, moved with much pomp and circumstance before admiring contemporaries. The refined mind, the sensitive soul, shrank from depicting the tragedy of the Crown of Thorns in the realistic fashion that would have proved acceptable to so many other artists. Luini forgets the blood and the spikes, he almost forgets the physical pain, and gives us the Man of Sorrows who has forgiven His tormentors because “they know not what they do.”

Continental galleries show us many treatments of the same familiar theme, they have none to show that can vie with this in a combination of strength and delicacy that sets out an immortal story while avoiding the brutal realism to which so many other artists have succumbed. We may suppose that the objects of the Society roused Luini’s sympathy to an extent that made it easy for him to accept the somewhat paltry remuneration with which the Brotherhood of the Holy Crown rewarded him, and so the picture makes its own appeal on the painter’s behalf, and tells a story of his claims upon our regard. A man may lie, in fact it may be suggested on the strength of the Psalmist’s statement that most men do, but an artist’s life work tells his story in spite of himself, and if he labour with pen or brush his truest biography will be seen in what he leaves behind him. It is not possible to play a part throughout all the vicissitudes of a long career, and no man could have given us the pictures that Luini has left unless he chanced to be a choice and rare spirit. We may remember here and now that the time was richer in violent contrasts than any of its successors, the most deplorable excesses on the one hand, the most rigid virtues on the other, seem to have been the special product of the Renaissance. While there were men who practised every vice under the sun there were others who sought to arrest Divine Retribution by the pursuit of all the virtues, and while the progress of the years has to a certain extent made men neutral tinted in character, the season of the Renaissance was one of violent contrasts. On behalf of the section that went in pursuit of righteousness let it be remembered that heaven and the saints were not matters for speculation, they were certainties. Every man knew that God was in heaven, and that if the workers of iniquity flourished, it was that they might be destroyed for ever. Every man knew that the saints still exerted their supernatural powers and would come down to earth if need be to protect a devotee. Satan, on the other hand, went armed about the earth seeking whom he might devour, and hell was as firmly fixed as heaven. In order to understand Luini, his life and times, these facts must be borne in mind. The greater the unrest in the cities the more the public attention would be turned to statesmen and warriors, and when the personalities of artists began to be considered, those who lived and thrived in the entourage of popes and rulers monopolised the attention. Hundreds of men were at work earning a fair living and some local repute, it was left to foreign favour to set a seal upon success. Had Luini chanced to be invited to Venice or to Rome he would have been honoured throughout Lombardy; but a painter like a prophet is often without honour in his own country. Luini’s gifts were of a more quiet and domestic order than those of his great contemporaries Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, for example, were more than painters, and perhaps it was only in Venice that painting stood by itself and managed to thrive alone. Luini would have come into his kingdom while he lived had Venice been his birthplace. The genius of the Florentine school sought to express itself in half-a-dozen different ways, no triumph in one department of work could satisfy men whose longing for self-expression was insatiable. In those days it was possible for a man to make himself master of all knowledge, literally he could discourse de omnibus rebus et quibusdam aliis. And this diffusion of interests was fatal to many a genius that might have moved to amazing triumph along one road.

It is clear that Bernardino Luini never travelled very far from his native country either physically or mentally. In the eyes of his contemporaries he was not a man of sufficient importance to receive commissions from the great art centres of Italy. This, of course, may be because he did not have the good fortune to attract the attention of the connoisseurs of his day, for we find that outside Milan, and the little town of Luino where he was born and whence he took his name, his work was done in comparatively small towns like Como, Legnano, Lugano, Ponte, and Saronno. Milan and Monza may be disregarded because we have already dealt with the work there. Saronno, which lies some fourteen miles north-west of Milan, is little more than a village to-day, and its chief claim upon the attention of the traveller is its excellent gingerbread for which it is famous throughout Lombardy. It has a celebrated church known as the Sanctuary of the Blessed Virgin and here one finds some very fine examples of our painter’s frescoes. Some of the frescoes in the church are painted by Cesare del Magno others by Lanini, and the rest are from the hand of Bernardino Luini. Round these frescoes, which are of abiding beauty, and include fine studies of the great plague saint, St. Roque, and that very popular martyr St. Sebastian, many legends congregate. It is said that Luini having killed a man in a brawl fled from Milan to the Church of the Blessed Virgin in Monza to claim sanctuary at the hand of the monks. They gave him the refuge he demanded, and, says the legend, he paid for it with frescoes. This is little more than a variant of the story that he went to Monza under similar circumstances and obtained the protection of the Pelucca family on the same terms. In the absence of anything in the nature of reliable record this story has been able to pass, but against it one likes to put the tradition that one of the heads in the frescoes is that of Luini himself. We find that head so simple, so refined, and so old—the beard is long and the hair is scanty—and so serene in its expression that it is exceedingly difficult to believe that brawling could have entered into the artist’s life.