Sala XVI. is entirely devoted to works by Luini. A fresco of angels bearing the corpse of St. Catherine to deposit in the Sepulchre (288) is a graceful composition. The well-known Madonna del Roseto (289) with its charming background of a rose-trellis is one of the most popular of this artist’s pictures. To us a more sympathetic work is the charcoal drawing (290) of the Madonna watching the Child, who sleeps on a cushion. Here is also a series of frescoes giving the story of S. Joseph, taken from the suppressed Church of Sta. Maria della Pace.
Sala XVII. contains works of the Lombard school of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. There is a large Polyptych (307) by Vincenzo Foppa. The central panel, Madonna and Child with Angels, is a very characteristic painting of the artist. The Madonna, stately and almost severely simple, is yet perfectly natural, and so is the Child as He touches the strings of the instrument held by an angel, leaning His head as if listening to the sound. The large heads and crumpled draperies of the angels are peculiarities which Foppa shares with the Lombard sculptors. St. Francis Receiving the Stigmata, in the panel above, is rather a feeble figure. The bright red and lavish use of gold in the side panels of saints have a rich effect. The Assumption of the Virgin (308), by Borgognone, dated 1522, is a poor work; in it all his faults are exaggerated; there is no movement in the figures, the background does not recede: the whole thing is absolutely lifeless. Bramantino’s large Crucifixion (309) is very inferior to his other works in the gallery.
The picture of the Madonna and Child, with the Doctors of the Church, and Lodovico il Moro, his wife Beatrice, and their children kneeling (310), has been variously attributed to Zenale, Bernardino dei Conti and Ambrogio de Predis. It has little artistic merit, much the best part being the portraits. The Virgin and Saints are heavy in type and coarse in execution, showing the Leonardesque influence imposed on the native school. Ambrogio de Predis seems to us the most probable author of this much disputed work. Marco d’Oggiono has three pictures—St. Paul (311), Assumption of the Virgin (312), the Archangels Michael, Raphael and Gabriel overcoming the Devil (313). There is no genuine inspiration in these works, nor any charm of colour or technique. We turn with relief to Boltraffio’s interesting and well-painted portrait of the poet Girolamo Casio (319). Martyrdom of St. Catherine of Alexandria (321), by Gaudenzio Farrari, a crowded and confused composition, shows the decadence of this able and facile painter.
We come to several large canvases by the family of Campi of Cremona. The best of these is Madonna Adoring the Child (329), by Giulio Campi; the technique is able, in the later Venetian style. Two pictures by Vincenzo Campi—a Fruitseller and Fishseller—are Flemish in manner. Next come the painters of Lodi, but we have not time to dwell on these productions of the later Milanese school. In the cases are drawings of various Italian schools.
Sala XVIII. contains productions of the late Lombard schools (sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) that repel by their brutal realism.
In Sala XIX. we have unimportant works of the schools of Parma, Reggio and Modena.
Sala XX. Ferrarese and Bolognese Schools.—The Ferrarese school is represented in this gallery by some splendid pictures of the best period. In his St. Sebastian (433) that richly imaginative artist Dosso Dossi, with his Cinquecento enjoyment of beauty and his mastery of dramatic effects of light and shade, has given us a picture of enthralling interest, painted with marvellous breadth and power. This strong young body, bound by uplifted arms to the tree, expresses the very passion of martyrdom. This is no mere physical agony; though the arrows visibly torture the flesh, they pierce the soul more sharply. The dark grove, where great fruits and leaves shine out, touched by a strange evil light, surrounds the figure with mystery and magic, which is heightened by the glimpse of a tranquil distant landscape. Not St. Sebastian, but a character from some Ariostean fable this seems—a young hero in search of truth ensnared by cruel necromancy, stripped and bound by the powers of evil. His knight’s helmet lies at his feet. The sensuous beauty of the picture increases its dramatic interest; the curve of the nude body, the flesh colour, incomparable in its coolness and its pearly shadow, crossed by that swathe of green drapery—a green all Dosso—the rich glossy leaves, the distant blue, all serve to deepen the tragedy.
Francesco d’Este, whose portrait (431), in the character of St. George, by Dosso, hangs beside St. Sebastian, was one of the sons of Duke Alfonso of Ferrara and Lucrezia Borgia. The St. John Baptist (432) is lighted as if by a fire from below, in a manner very characteristic of Dosso.
The Adoration of the Magi (429) by Lorenzo Costa, the predella of an altarpiece by Francia, is a good example of the master.
The great altarpiece (428) is a majestic composition, and especially interesting as the work of that rarest painter, the Ferrarese Ercole de’ Roberti, who in the grand architectural and decorative environment of this Madonna Enthroned shows himself faithful to the precepts of Cosimo Tura. But the arrangement of the triple figures on the throne—St. Anne and St. Elizabeth seated on stools on either side of the Virgin, with a sort of pyramidal effect—and the types of the heads, especially of the fair and regal Virgin, are very individual. The figures of St. Augustine and of Peter the Sinner, below, complete the stately arrangement. The beautiful harmony of red and purple and puce and gorgeous reddish gold shows with rare splendour the Ferrarese feeling for colour.