The Art Of Bernardino Luini

( Originally Published 1907 )

GEORGES LAFENESTRE 'MAÎTRES ANCIENS'

THE most eminent men of genius in any epoch may be compared to great forest trees that rear their branches into the sunlight, while their trunks remain in shadow, and the eye, attracted by their imposing magnificence, overlooks the smaller trees, their offsprings, which stand beside them. How many excellent painters at Rome and Florence were thus quite overshadowed by Raphael and Michelangelo! In Lombardy Leonardo da Vinci was a like overshadowing influence. But great as it was, Leonardo's genius was not an isolated thing; and the student who directs his attention to some of the lesser painters who were his followers and admirers will not find himself unrepaid.

Before Da Vinci's arrival at Milan, in 1483, the voluptuous and spend-thrift court of the Sforzas had already in its service a number of excellent local artists, who may be divided into three groups, one following Bramante, another devoted to the culture of the antique after the example of the Paduans, while the third drew inspiration chiefly from the nature and life about them. Thus art in Lombardy was already in movement, and Leonardo only took the lead in the march and hastened its activity.

But in spite of his precautions to transmit the broadest traditions of art, the irresistible power of Leonardo's personality would, no doubt, in the long run, have produced the same fatal results in Lombardy that the influence of Raphael produced at Rome, and that of Michelangelo at Florence, had it not been for the course of political events. A series of revolutions, dating from the advent of Charles VIII. of France, in 1494, embroiled all Upper Italy and cut short the spread of any dominant influence. After the fall of his patron, Lodovico Sforza, Leonardo fled first to Florence and later to Rome, only returning to Milan to confide the care of his old age to the youthful ultra-montane conqueror, Francis I., who took him to France in 1516, where he died, shortly after, at the Hôtel de Cloux, near Amboise. His direct pupils and followers left Milan at the same time. His favorite, the charming and gentle Francesco Melzi, followed him into exile, and when, after the master's death, he returned heartbroken to Milan, he had ceased to paint and lived only in the past. Andrea Solario, also Leonardo's companion in exile, remained in France. Beltraffio had died in his early youth, before his master; and Cesare da Sesto, who had meantime become the close friend of Raphael, never returned from Rome.

The place which Leonardo had occupied was thus left vacant at Milan; and, having lost their leader, the Lombard painters regained, in a sort, their independence—if vacillation between the traditions of Padua and Florence, of Mantegna and Leonardo, can be called independence. There were, how-ever, at this time in Milan two men of greater individuality, who were to be-come famous: Gaudenzio Ferrari, bold, daring, a lover of great spectacles and energetic coloring, and Bernardino Luini, sympathetic, charming, de-voted to grace, and most susceptible to beauty.

No better example than that of Luini could be cited to prove with what power a great genius imposes itself on a weaker, though an even more than usually individual, nature. Luini was the faithful follower of Leonardo from a distance. Indeed, so closely did he adapt his style to that of Da Vinci that their works have, until recently, been commonly confounded, most of Luini's pictures having at one time or another been attributed to a master whose pupil he had in all probability never been.

With an artist so unequal as Luini always was, it is impossible to deter-mine the sequence of his works with any precision in the absence of documents; but some of his frescos, now in the Brera Gallery, Milan, show, nevertheless, such involuntary awkwardness in parts that we may unhesitatingly attribute them to the fumblings of juvenile inexperience, and not to the carelessness of an accomplished painter. Yet, even in his early works, Luini's individual bent is clearly apparent. He already knows how to endow his figures with that naïve lovableness which was peculiar to him, and already shows, in his methods of grouping and action and his manner of ex-pressing sentiment, that same charming and primitive simplicity which was more and more to single him out among contemporaries who were daily further and further misled by examples from Rome and Venice into attempting theatrical mise en scène and picturesque over-action.

Even in these early works, too, we may perceive that Luini was one of those Renaissance artists who most naturally apperceived impressions of the outer world after the antique fashion. Pompeii and Herculaneum had not yet come to light, and fragments of the works of Greeks and Romans were still rare, even in the Eternal City. It is doubtful if Luini could have seen any great number of them even in drawings, but he seems to have penetrated the spirit of classic art with an ease which can be explained only by a natural aptitude. His early compositions, by their simplicity, often recall the disposition of the classic bas-reliefs; and before more than one of his pictures we seem to catch some hint of a less sensual antiquity, a sort of Christian Pompeii, as it were. His lighting is always simple, without any violent effects of chiaroscuro; but the outlines are not drawn with the rigidity of the Primitives, and the soft coloring has none of that look of sharpness or dryness which was so common in the frescos of his own time.

He never, from these beginnings on—and it is perhaps one of his most delightful characteristics—seems to have made any of the pretensions either to ideal or technical elaborateness which were common with so many of the artists of his day. Throughout his whole achievement we find no touch of mannerism; and he owes his unfailing seductiveness to the surety with which he selected from common life the attitudes of grace, and to the unassumed elevation of a sensitive, beauty-loving imagination, which kept him equally from labored subtlety or banal trivialities.

The subjects, at least of his easel-pictures, are but little varied. `The Daughter of Herodias," The Holy Family,' and the `Madonna and Child' were for him inexhaustible themes in which he might best show his exquisite understanding of feminine beauty and delicate appreciation of maternal love. His figures of women, taken from his own race, may be divided into two principal types, which seem to have haunted his imagination from first to last. One was the slender woman of aristocratic blood, fine, delicate, and white, whose blond waving tresses, dark passionate eyes, and insoluble and disquieting smile had already bewitched Leonardo; the other was the strong woman of the people, with square shoulders and fine ruddy flesh, thick black hair, and frank open eyes. His figures of the child Jesus or of the little St. John are always vivacious, dimpled, rosy children, true portraits of the Italian babies which he must have seen playing before the doorways beside the long dusty roads.

At a time when imitation of the greater masters of Rome, Florence, and Venice was the fashion, Luini had the good sense never to swamp his own natural and sympathetic expression in striving after great effects or tours de force of execution. Formed in the most cunning and skilful of all the schools of painting, he nevertheless, by the candor of his impressions, and the modesty of his expressions, remains linked with the Primitives. Like them, his religious subjects were expressions of the sincere piety with which his soul overflowed, not pretexts for the exhibition of artistic sleight of hand. Like them, he never ceased to welcome any sweet and simple suggestion which casual living nature might afford. Like them, he charms us by that sincere poetry which disappeared in the other Italian artists just in measure as they became enslaved by tradition.

Less knowing, less bold, less beautiful, less sure, than his master Leo-

nardo; less careful in his execution than his co-disciples, Cesare da Sesto, Sala, and Solario; less various in composition and less rich in color than his companion and pupil, Gaudenzio Ferrari, he was superior to all of them, yes, even to Leonardo himself, in the sympathetic charm, naïve emotion, and sincere tenderness which breathe from his works.-ABRIDGED FROM THE FRENCH

A. F. RIO ODE L'ART CHRÉTIEN'

OF all the gaps which occur in Vasari's `Lives of the Painters,' that which seems most incomprehensible and unpardonable is his omission of any adequate mention of Bernardino Luini. One would have thought that Luini's but recently completed works must have forced themselves upon his admiration, or at any rate upon his notice, for when Vasari visited Milan in 1565 he must have seen them everywhere,—in churches, in chapels, in all public places. He could not have remained blind to the admiration of the Milanese for them, and to their reverential esteem for the memory of the painter. In the face of all these reasons for having included Luini's biography in his history, Vasari did omit him, however; and it seems as though he must have been actuated by some reason stronger than any mere school rivalry. . . .

'Whether Bernardino Luini was Leonardo's direct pupil, or whether he appropriated the master's style and manner, as far as in him lay, because of mere natural inclination for that form of expression, it is certain at any rate that no other painter ever availed himself so largely, and, be it added, so worthily, of the heritage left by the great Florentine. And yet, though from a purely external point of view none ever followed Leonardo so closely, it should be added at once, lest we do injustice to Luini, that there lay in his nature two qualities which were dominant even over his passion for Leonardo's manner. One of these was his religious sentiment; the other was his innate love of grace,—a grace as spontaneous and free from affectation as was his piety. From Leonardo he took his gracious types, and simplified them; his severe types, and softened, often weakened, them; but in many a picture, particularly those in which he painted the Virgin and the Child, or the saints in moments of fervor or repentance, he shows himself spiritually superior to Leonardo.

The difference, perhaps, was due no more to their differences of character than to those of circumstance and environment. Leonardo da Vinci played a princely part on the world's stage. His patrons were sovereigns. Every one of his rare brush-strokes was hailed with acclaim. For nearly twenty years he reigned supreme over the school which he himself had created. Luini, on the other hand, fell upon evil days, and doubtless bore his full share of the public misery and oppression to which Milan, the city of his adoption, was subjected. His patrons must have been principally those who wept for things present and prayed for things to come; and as the evil years followed one another without notable surcease, he was in no danger of lacking inspiration for the type of art such patrons desired. His mission, as it was set him by his times, was to delight the eyes of those in whom present misery had quickened the desire for beauty, and whose thoughts had been turned by temporal oppression to things of heaven. These circumstances may, perhaps, explain something of Luini's constant and unworldly grace, and the gentle melancholy and sincere piety of his saints and Virgins.

On the side of pure artistry, however, be it remembered that he never ceased to copy Leonardo's works, piously finishing—at least so the story goes—those that the master had left uncompleted. But in addition to the major influence, direct or indirect, of Leonardo, two minor influences concurred in affecting Luini's work. The first of these was upon the spiritual side, and came from Gaudenzio Ferrari, his coreligionist in faith and art, from whom he borrowed something of religious sentiment: the second was upon the external side, and was due to Raphael, from whom Luini borrowed to a certain extent in manner. But these secondary influences are not always easily apparent in his works. They are rather like undercurrents, which influence the drift but do not show upon the surface; and in the main we shall not misjudge Luini if we call him a painter whose style was an imitation, so far as in him lay, of Leonardo da Vinci's, but whose work was individualized and tinctured by a native grace and a sincere and unaffected piety.-FROM THE FRENCH