Moretto's picture has found its place (in a dark recess, alas!) in the Church of Santa Maria presso San Celso, in the suburbs of Milan, hard by the site of the old Roman cemetery, where Ambrose, at a moment when in one of his many conflicts a "sign" was needed, found the bodies of Nazarus and Celsus, youthful patrician martyrs in the reign of Nero, overflowing now with miraculous powers, their blood still fresh upon them--conspersa recenti sanguine. The body of Saint Nazarus he removed into the city: that of Saint Celsus remained within the little sanctuary [93] which still bears his name, and beside which, in the fifteenth century, arose the glorious Church of the Madonna, with spacious atrium after the Ambrosian manner, a facade richly sculptured in the style of the Renaissance, and sumptuously adorned within. Behind the massive silver tabernacle of the altar of the miraculous picture which gave its origin to this splendid building, the rare visitor, peeping as into some sacred bird-nest, detects one of the loveliest works of Luini, a small, but exquisitely finished "Holy Family." Among the fine pictures around are works by two other very notable religious painters of the cinque-cento. Both alike, Ferrari and Borgognone, may seem to have introduced into fiery Italian latitudes a certain northern temperature, and somewhat twilight, French, or Flemish, or German, thoughts. Ferrari, coming from the neighbourhood of Varallo, after work at Vercelli and Novara, returns thither to labour, as both sculptor and painter, in the "stations" of the Sacro Monte, at a form of religious art which would seem to have some natural kinship with the temper of a mountain people. It is as if the living actors in the "Passion Play" of Oberammergau had been transformed into almost illusive groups in painted terra-cotta. The scenes of the Last Supper, of the Martyrdom of the Innocents, of the Raising of Jairus' daughter, for instance, are certainly touching in the naive piety of their life-sized realism. But Gaudenzio Ferrari had many [94] helpmates at the Sacro Monte; and his lovelier work is in the Franciscan Church at the foot of the hill, and in those two, truly Italian, far-off towns of the Lombard plain. Even in his great, many-storied fresco in the Franciscan Church at Varallo there are traces of a somewhat barbaric hankering after solid form; the armour of the Roman soldiers, for example, is raised and gilt. It is as if this serious soul, going back to his mountain home, had lapsed again into mountain "grotesque," with touches also, in truth, of a peculiarly northern poetry--a mystic poetry, which now and again, in his treatment, for instance, of angel forms and faces, reminds one of Blake. There is something of it certainly in the little white spectral soul of the penitent thief making its escape from the dishonoured body along the beam of his cross.