Part 3

To his contemporaries it is clear that Luini was a man of small importance. His best work is seen outside the radius of the great Art centres of Italy, and it was only when he attracted the attention of great critics and sound judges like Morelli, John Ruskin, and John Addington Symonds that the lovers of beautiful pictures began to go out of their way to find his best work in the little towns whose churchmen were his patrons. So many of the lesser men had all his faults--that is to say, lack of perspective and inability to compose a big picture--that he was classed with them by those critics whose special gift lies in the discovery of faults. The qualities that make the most enduring appeal to us to-day were those that were least likely to make a strong impression upon the strenuous age of physical force in which he lived. When great conquerors and men who had accomplished all that force could achieve felt themselves at liberty to turn to prolonged consideration of the other sides of life they employed other masters. Then as now there were fashions in painters. The men for whom Luini strove were of comparatively small importance. A conqueror could have gathered up in the hollow of his hand all the cities, Milan excepted, in which Luini worked throughout his well-spent life, and in the stress and strife of the later years when great pictures did change hands from time to time by conquest, Luini's panel pictures in the little cities of his labours passed quite unnoticed, while even if the frescoes were admired it was not easy to move them. When at last his undoubted merits began to attract attention of connoisseurs, these connoisseurs were wondering why Leonardo da Vinci had left such a small number of pictures. They found work that bore a great resemblance to Leonardo and they promptly claimed that they had discovered the lost masterpieces. Consequently Leonardo received the credit that was due to the man who may have worked in his Milanese school and was undoubtedly under his influence for a time. And many of the beautiful panel pictures that show Luini at his best were attributed to Leonardo until nineteenth-century criticism proved competent enough to render praise where it was due, and to say definitely and with firm conviction that the unknown painter from Luino, who lived sometime between 1470 and 1540, was the true author.

If, in dealing with the life of Bernardino Luini, we are forced to content ourselves with meagre scraps of biography and little details that would have no importance at all in dealing with a life that was traceable from early days to its conclusion, it is well to remember that the most important part of the great artist is his work. Beethoven's nine symphonies, Milton's "Paradise Lost," the landscapes of Corot, the portraits of Velazquez, and the carving of Grinling Gibbons are not more precious to us because we know something of the life of the men who did the work. Nor are the "Iliad" and the fragments that remain of the works of the great Greek sculptors less to us because a shadowy tradition is all that surrounds the lives of the men who gave immortal work to the world. We must remember that it is as difficult to deal with art in terms of literature as it is to express the subtle charm of music in words. Had Luini's years boasted or regretted a series of gossiping newspapers we should have gathered a rich harvest of fact, but the facts would have left the painter where he is. There is enough of Luini left in Milan and the smaller places we have named to tell us what the man was and the spirit in which he worked, and while we will welcome the new-comer who can add to our scanty store of authenticated facts we can hardly expect that they will deepen our admiration of work that for all its shortcomings must be remembered when we turn to ponder the greatest achievements of Italian Art. It forms "a magic speculum, much gone to rust, indeed, yet in fragments still clear; wherein the marvellous image of his existence does still shadow itself, though fitfully, and as with an intermittent light."

The plates are printed by BEMROSE DALZIEL, LTD., Watford

The text at the BALLANTYNE PRESS, Edinburgh