The most talented of all the Lombard painters was Giovanni Antonio Bazzi, called il Sodoma, for though Tuscany and Rome were the scenes of his activity and possess his greatest works, yet he derives his artistic descent from Lombardy. He was born at Vercelli in Piedmont in 1477, and studied painting for two or three years at Milan before going to Siena, where we hear of him in 1501. His painting shows plainly his origin, and some of his works have great affinity to Leonardo, though he is not known to have been actually his pupil. The Leonardesque tradition was carried on by the brothers Martino and Albertino Piazza of Lodi, whose work is suave and pleasing, but weak. The family of Campi, two generations, worked through three-quarters of the sixteenth century. Their work is able, but without distinction; they show a Venetian influence. Bernardino Lanino was a pupil and imitator of Gaudenzio Ferrari; he was active through the middle of the sixteenth century. The school dies away with Lomazzo, more famous for his writings on Art than for his paintings, and with Daniele Crespi, in whom we see all the exaggerated realism of the decadence of Art. CHAPTER X _The Duomo_ “The far-famed Cathedral of Milan, which men call the eighth wonder of the world.” In Milan, as we see the city to-day, modernised, commonplace, characterlessly handsome, there is one great redeeming thing—the Cathedral. Other churches there are, greater and more beautiful in every sense except size, but they are smothered in the dull drift of everyday buildings. The Duomo, as is befitting, has a supreme position. It is the heart of the city, the converging point of all the far-coming ways, the irresistible magnet for the eyes of the myriads thronging those ways. It rises up in its immense stature above the petty interests and activities of the crowds at its base, an embodied exhalation of the holy spirit of man, a witness to the irrepressible upward flight of his thoughts and to his eternal need of beauty and light. The impression which a traveller coming from the station first receives of the Duomo is of a vast ethereal presence at the end of the long street, so light, so cloud-like, so delicate that it seems to be no temple piled up slowly by men’s hands to the measure of their prayers, but a fabric of some upper sphere, built of air and dreams. Broad set in its main proportions, it gives high and ample seat to the swelling contour of the cupola, which a hundred pinnacles guard like serried spears, pointing into the upper blue around the spring of the midmost spire. In the silvery light of afternoon it appears a shadowy forest of upward-springing shafts, with sharp gleams along edges and salient lines. The details are lost in a soft mass, and the atmosphere casts over all a veil of illusion. Through such a veil this famous Cathedral of Milan is best seen and best understood.