Bernardino, "dear little Bernard," the son of Giovanni Lutero, called Luini from his birthplace Luino, on the Lago Maggiore, is perhaps, says Ruskin, "the best central type of the highly-trained Italian painter," being "alone in uniting consummate art-power with untainted simplicity of religious imagination." "The two elements, poised in perfect balance, are so calmed and restrained, each by the other, that most of us lose the sense of both." Next to nothing is known of his life beyond journeys to various places in the lake district--Lugano, Legnano, and Saronno, to paint frescoes. "We have no anecdotes of him, only hundreds of noble works. Child of the Alps, and of their divinest lake, he is taught, without doubt or dismay, a lofty religious creed, and a sufficient law of life, and of its mechanical arts. Whether lessoned by Leonardo himself, or merely one of many, disciplined in the system of the Milanese School, he learns unerringly to draw, unerringly and enduringly to paint" ... "a mighty colourist, while Leonardo was only a fine draughtsman in black, staining the chiaroscuro drawing like a coloured print." Luini's "tasks are set him without question day by day, by men who are justly satisfied with his work, and who accept it without any harmful praise or senseless blame. Place, scale, and subject are determined for him on the cloister wall or the church dome; as he is required, and for sufficient daily bread, and little more, he paints what he has been taught to design wisely and has passion to realise gloriously: every touch he lays is eternal, every thought he conceives is beautiful and pure" (_Queen of the Air_, § 157; _Catalogue of the Educational Series_, p. 43; Oxford _Lectures on Art_, §§ 73, 92). This picture, formerly ascribed to Leonardo, belongs to Luini's second period, when he was under the influence of that master. To his third and independent manner belong the frescoes at Milan, Saronno, and Lugano, and the three pictures in Como Cathedral (Morelli's _Italian Masters in German Galleries_, 1883, pp. 435-438). Luini's female figures (says Sir Frederick Burton) "are full of sweetness and gracious dignity; and should we incline to cavil at the monotony of his type, its loveliness disarms us. But a merit even higher than his sense of beauty is the pathos which he infused into subjects that required it. These he imagined from within outwards, following his inspiration without egotism or mannerism. He appears to most advantage in fresco; for few have understood so well as he the management of the limited palette of the fresco painter, and that skilful juxtaposition of tints by which the value of each is exalted. The decorated party-wall and adjacent chapels in S.