In the beginning of the long and fascinating history of Italian Art we see that the spirit of the Renaissance first fluttered over the minds of men much as the spirit of life is said have moved over the face of the waters before the first chapter of creation’s marvellous story was written. Beginnings were small, progress was slow, and the lives of the great artists moved very unevenly to their appointed end.

There were some who rose to fame and fortune during their life, and then died so completely that no biography can hope to rouse any interest in their work among succeeding generations.

There were others who worked in silence and without rÉclame of any sort, content with the respect and esteem of those with whom they came into immediate contact, indifferent to the plaudits of the crowd or the noisy praises of those who are not qualified to judge. True servants of the western world’s religion, they translated work into terms of moral life, and moral life into terms of work. Merit like truth will out, and when time has sifted good work from bad and spurious reputations from genuine ones, many men who fluttered the dovecotes of their own generation disappear from sight altogether; some others who wrought unseen, never striving to gain the popular ear or eye, rise on a sudden to heights that might have made them giddy had they lived to be conscious of their own elevation. They were lowly, but their fame inherits the earth.

Bernardino Luini, the subject of this little study, calls us away from the great art centres—from Venice and Florence and Rome; his record was made and is to be found to-day amid the plains of Lombardy. Milan is not always regarded as one of the great art centres of Italy in spite of the Brera, the Ambrosiana, and the Poldi Pezzoli Palace collections, but no lover of pictures ever went for the first time to the galleries of Milan in a reverent spirit and with a patient eye without feeling that he had discovered a painter of genius. He may not even have heard his name before, but he will come away quite determined to learn all he may about the man who painted the wonderful frescoes that seem destined to retain their spiritual beauty till the last faint trace of the design passes beyond the reach of the eye, the man who painted the panel picture of the “Virgin of the Rose Trees,” reproduced with other of his master-works in these pages.

To go to the Brera is to feel something akin to hunger for the history of Bernardino Luini or Luino or Luvino as he is called by the few who have found occasion to mention him, although perhaps Luini is the generally accepted and best known spelling of the name. Unfortunately the hungry feeling cannot be fully satisfied. Catalogues or guide books date the year of Luini’s birth at or about 1470, and tell us that he died in 1533, and as this is a period that Giorgio Vasari covers, we turn eagerly to the well-remembered volumes of the old gossip hoping to find some stories of the Lombard painter’s life and work. We are eager to know what manner of man Luini was, what forces influenced him, how he appeared to his contemporaries, whether he had a fair measure of the large success that attended the leading artists of his day. Were his patrons great men who rewarded him as he deserved—how did he fare when the evening came wherein no man may work? Surely there is ample scope for the score of quaint comments and amusing if unreliable anecdotes with which Vasari livens his pages. We are confident that there will be much to reward the search, because Bernardino Luini and Giorgio Vasari were contemporaries after a fashion. Vasari would have been twenty-one years old when Luini died, the writer of the “Lives” would have seen frescoes and panel pictures in all the glory of their first creation. He could not have failed to be impressed by the extraordinary beauty of the artist’s conceptions, the skill of his treatment of single figures, the wealth of the curious and elusive charm that we call atmosphere—a charm to which all the world’s masterpieces are indebted in varying degrees—the all-pervading sense of a delightful and refined personality, leaves us eager for the facts that must have been well within the grasp of the painter’s contemporaries.

Alas for these expectations! Vasari dismisses Bernardino del Lupino, as he calls him, in six or eight sentences, and what he says has no biographical value at all. The reference reads suspiciously like what is known in the world of journalism as padding. Indeed, as Vasari was a fair judge, and Bernardino Luini was not one of those Venetians whom Vasari held more or less in contempt, there seems to be some reason for the silence. Perhaps it was an intimate and personal one, some unrecorded bitterness between the painter and one of Vasari’s friends, or between Vasari himself and Luini or one of his brothers or children. Whatever the cause there is no mistake about the result. We grumble at Vasari, we ridicule his inaccuracies, we regret his limitations, we scoff at his prejudices, but when he withholds the light of his investigation from contemporary painters who did not enjoy the favour of popes and emperors, we wander in a desert land without a guide, and search with little or no success for the details that would serve to set the painter before us.

Many men have taken up the work of investigation, for Luini grows steadily in favour and esteem, but what Vasari might have done in a week nobody has achieved in a decade.

A few unimportant church documents relating to commissions given to the painter are still extant. He wrote a few words on his frescoes; here and there a stray reference appears in the works of Italian writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but our knowledge when it has been sifted and arranged is remarkably small and deplorably incomplete. Dr. J. C. Williamson, a painstaking critic and a competent scholar, has written an interesting volume dealing with the painter, and in the making of it he has consulted nearly fifty authorities—Italian, French, English, and German—only to find it is impossible to gather a short chapter of reliable and consecutive biography from them all. Our only hope lies in the discovery of some rich store of information in the public or private libraries of Milan among the manuscripts that are the delight of the scholars. Countless documents lie unread, many famous libraries are uncatalogued, the archives of several noble Italian houses that played an important part in fifteenth and sixteenth century Italy have still to be given to the world. It is not unreasonable to suppose that records of Luini’s life exist, and in these days when scholarship is ever extending its boundaries there is hope that some scholar will lay the ever growing circle of the painter’s admirers under lasting obligations. Until that time comes we must be content to know the man through the work that he has left behind him, through the medium of fading frescoes, stray altarpieces, and a few panel pictures. Happily they have a definite and pleasant story to tell.

We must go to Milan for Luini just as we must go to Rome for Raphael and to Madrid for Velazquez and Titian and to Venice for Jacopo Robusti whom men still call the Little Dyer (Tintoretto). In London we have one painting on wood, “Christ and the Pharisees,” brought from the Borghese Palace in Rome. The head of Christ is strangely feminine, the four Pharisees round him are finely painted, and the picture has probably been attributed to Leonardo da Vinci at some period of its career. There are three frescoes in South Kensington and a few panel pictures in private collections. The Louvre is more fortunate than our National Gallery, it has several frescoes and two or three panels. In Switzerland, in the Church of St. Mary and the Angels in Lugano, is a wonderful screen picture of the “Passion of Christ” with some hundreds of figures in it, and the rest of Luini’s work seems to be in Italy. The greater part is to be found in Milan, some important frescoes having been brought to the Brera from the house of the Pelucca family in Monza, while there are some important works in Florence in the Pitti and Uffizi Galleries. In the Church of St. Peter at Luino on the shores of Lake Maggiore, the little town where Benardino was born and from which he took his name, there are some frescoes but they are in a very faded condition. The people of the lake side town have much to say about the master who has made Luino a place of pilgrimage but their stories are quite unreliable.

It might be held, seeing that the artist’s work is scanty, and often in the last stages of decay, while his life story has faded quite from the recovered records of his contemporaries, that Luini is hardly fit subject for discussion here. In a series of little books that seeks to introduce great artists to new friends through the medium of reproductions that show the work as it is, and a brief concise description that aims at helping those who are interested to study the master for themselves, there is a temptation to deal only with popular men. These give no trouble to their biographer or his readers, but after all it is not the number of pictures that an artist paints or the wealth of detail that his admirers have collected that establishes his claim to be placed among the immortals. His claim rests upon the quality of the work done, its relation to the times in which it was painted, the mood or spirit it reveals, the light it throws upon the mind that conceived and the hand that executed it.

We know enough and to spare of the more flamboyant personalities of the Venetian and Florentine schools. Long periods of study will not exhaust all there is to learn about men like Titian, Michelangelo, Raphael of Urbino, and the rest, but Luini, though he left no written record, will not be denied. We dare not pass him by, seeing that we may introduce him to some admirers who will, in days to come, seek and find what remains beyond 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.