rare material, so lavish in its bestowal of the costliest workmanship on ornamental episodes, brought into truer keeping with a pure and simple structural effect. All the great sculptor-architects of Lombardy worked in succession on this miracle of beauty; and this may account for the sustained perfection of style, which nowhere suffers from the languor of exhaustion in the artist or from repetition of motives. It remains the triumph of North Italian genius, exhibiting qualities of tenderness and self abandonment to inspiration which we lack in the severer masterpieces of the Tuscan school. To Borgognone is assigned the painting of the roof in nave and choir--exceeding rich, varied, and withal in sympathy with stately Gothic style. Borgognone, again, is said to have designed the saints and martyrs worked in _tarsia_ for the choir-stalls. His frescoes are in some parts well preserved, as in the lovely little Madonna at the end of the south chapel, while the great fresco above the window in the south transept has an historical value that renders it interesting in spite of partial decay. The Certosa is a wilderness of lovely workmanship. From Borgognone’s majesty we pass into the quiet region of Luini’s Christian grace, or mark the influence of Leonardo on that rare Assumption of Madonna by his pupil Andrea Solari. Like everything touched by the Leonardesque spirit, this great picture was left unfinished; yet Northern Italy has nothing finer to show than the landscape outspread in its immeasurable purity of calm, behind the grouped Apostles, and the ascendant Mother of Heaven. The feeling of that happy region between the Alps and Lombardy, where there are many waters--_et tacitos sine labe lacus sine murmure rivos_--and where the last spurs of the mountains sink in undulations to the plain, has passed into this azure vista, just as all Umbria is suggested in a twilight background of young Raphael or Perugino. The portraits of the dukes of Milan and their families carry us into a very different realm of feeling. Medallions above the doors of sacristy and chancel, stately figures reared aloft beneath gigantic canopies, men and women slumbering with folded hands upon their marble biers--we read in all these sculptured forms a strange record of human restlessness resolved into the quiet of the tomb. The iniquities of Gian Galeazzo Visconti, _il gran Biscione_; the blood-thirst of Gian Maria; the dark designs of Fillipo and his secret vices; Francesco Sforza’s treason; Galeazzo Maria’s vanities and lusts; their tyrant’s dread of thunder and the knife; their awful deaths by pestilence and the assassin’s poniard; their selfishness, oppression, cruelty and fraud; the murders of their kinsmen; their labyrinthine plots and acts of broken faith;--all is tranquil now, and we can say to each what Bosola found for the Duchess of Malfi ere her execution: