Paris: Grant Allen's Historical GuidesAllen, Grant
History
Paris: Grant Allen's Historical Guides
Allen, Grant
Paris (France) -- Description and travel; Paris (France) -- Guidebooks
Now Luini, though he belongs to the 16th century, and though he produced
some of his most beautiful works as cabinet or panel pictures, was yet
almost as essentially a painter in fresco as Fra Angelico or
Ghirlandajo. He can best be appreciated in Milan and its neighbourhood.
And I will add a few notes here for the benefit of those who know Italy,
and who can recall the works they have seen in that country. At the
Brera in Milan, an immense number of his frescoes, cut out from
churches, can be seen and compared to great advantage. Everybody who has
visited that noble gallery must recall at least the exquisite figure of
St. Catherine placed in her sarcophagus by angels, as well as the lovely
Madonna with St. Antony and St. Barbara, where the face and beard of the
aged anchorite somewhat recall the treatment of the old bearded king in
the Adoration of the Magi in this gallery. Still better can Luini’s work
be understood by those who know the Sanctuary at Saronno, where a
splendid series of his frescoes still exists on the wall of the great
church in which they were painted. The two frescoes here in the Salle
Duchâtel are not quite so fine either as those at Saronno or as the very
best examples among the collection at the Brera. Nevertheless, they are
beautiful and delicately-toned specimens of Luini’s work, and, if
studied in conjunction with other pictures by the same artist in the
adjoining rooms, they will serve to give a tolerably just conception of
his style and genius.
Luini is essentially a =Leonardesque painter=. He was not actually a
pupil of Leonardo; but like all other Lombard artists of his time, he
was deeply influenced by the temperament and example of the Florentine
master. If you wish to see the kind of work produced by the Lombard
school _before_ it had undergone this quickening influence of
Leonardo,—been Tuscanised and Leonardised—look at the Borgognones in
the Long Gallery. These, again, are not at all satisfactory specimens of
that tender, delicate, and silvery colourist. To appreciate Borgognone
as he ought to be appreciated, however, you must have seen him at home
in the Certosa di Pavia: though even those who know only his exquisitely
spiritual altar-piece of the Madonna with the two St. Catherines (of
Alexandria and Siena) in the National Gallery will recognise how
inadequately his work is represented by the specimens in the Louvre.
Nevertheless, these examples, inferior though they be in style and
feeling, will serve fairly well to indicate the point to which art had
attained in Lombardy _before_ the advent of Leonardo. I need not point
out their comparatively archaic character, and their close following of
earlier methods and motives. Again, if you compare with Borgognone the
subsequent group of Leonardesque painters,—Solario and his
contemporaries,—whose works hang close by on the left-hand wall of the
Long Gallery, you will see how immense was the change which Leonardo
introduced into Lombard art.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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