Bernardino Luini

by James Mason

This picture, one of the treasures of the beautiful collection in the Pinacoteca of Ambrosiana in the Piazza della Rosa, hangs by the same artist’s picture of “John the Baptist as a Child.” The right hand of Christ is raised in the attitude of benediction, and the head has a curiously genuine beauty. The preservation of this picture is wonderful, the colouring retains much of its early glow. The head is almost feminine in its tenderness and bears a likeness to Luini’s favourite model.

To go to the Brera is to feel something akin to hunger for the history of Bernardino Luini or Luino or Luvino as he is called by the few who have found occasion to mention him, although perhaps Luini is the generally accepted and best known spelling of the name. Unfortunately the hungry feeling cannot be fully satisfied. Catalogues or guide books date the year of Luini’s birth at or about 1470, and tell us that he died in 1533, and as this is a period that Giorgio Vasari covers, we turn eagerly to the well-remembered volumes of the old gossip hoping to find some stories of the Lombard painter’s life and work. We are eager to know what manner of man Luini was, what forces influenced him, how he appeared to his contemporaries, whether he had a fair measure of the large success that attended the leading artists of his day. Were his patrons great men who rewarded him as he deserved—how did he fare when the evening came wherein no man may work? Surely there is ample scope for the score of quaint comments and amusing if unreliable anecdotes with which Vasari livens his pages. We are confident that there will be much to reward the search, because Bernardino Luini and Giorgio Vasari were contemporaries after a fashion. Vasari would have been twenty-one years old when Luini died, the writer of the “Lives” would have seen frescoes and panel pictures in all the glory of their first creation. He could not have failed to be impressed by the extraordinary beauty of the artist’s conceptions, the skill of his treatment of single figures, the wealth of the curious and elusive charm that we call atmosphere—a charm to which all the world’s masterpieces are indebted in varying degrees—the all-pervading sense of a delightful and refined personality, leaves us eager for the facts that must have been well within the grasp of the painter’s contemporaries.

Alas for these expectations! Vasari dismisses Bernardino del Lupino, as he calls him, in six or eight sentences, and what he says has no biographical value at all. The reference reads suspiciously like what is known in the world of journalism as padding. Indeed, as Vasari was a fair judge, and Bernardino Luini was not one of those Venetians whom Vasari held more or less in contempt, there seems to be some reason for the silence. Perhaps it was an intimate and personal one, some unrecorded bitterness between the painter and one of Vasari’s friends, or between Vasari himself and Luini or one of his brothers or children. Whatever the cause there is no mistake about the result. We grumble at Vasari, we ridicule his inaccuracies, we regret his limitations, we scoff at his prejudices, but when he withholds the light of his investigation from contemporary painters who did not enjoy the favour of popes and emperors, we wander in a desert land without a guide, and search with little or no success for the details that would serve to set the painter before us.

Many men have taken up the work of investigation, for Luini grows steadily in favour and esteem, but what Vasari might have done in a week nobody has achieved in a decade.

A few unimportant church documents relating to commissions given to the painter are still extant. He wrote a few words on his frescoes; here and there a stray reference appears in the works of Italian writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but our knowledge when it has been sifted and arranged is remarkably small and deplorably incomplete. Dr. J. C. Williamson, a painstaking critic and a competent scholar, has written an interesting volume dealing with the painter, and in the making of it he has consulted nearly fifty authorities—Italian, French, English, and German—only to find it is impossible to gather a short chapter of reliable and consecutive biography from them all. Our only hope lies in the discovery of some rich store of information in the public or private libraries of Milan among the manuscripts that are the delight of the scholars. Countless documents lie unread, many famous libraries are uncatalogued, the archives of several noble Italian houses that played an important part in fifteenth and sixteenth century Italy have still to be given to the world. It is not unreasonable to suppose that records of Luini’s life exist, and in these days when scholarship is ever extending its boundaries there is hope that some scholar will lay the ever growing circle of the painter’s admirers under lasting obligations. Until that time comes we must be content to know the man through the work that he has left behind him, through the medium of fading frescoes, stray altarpieces, and a few panel pictures. Happily they have a definite and pleasant story to tell.

We must go to Milan for Luini just as we must go to Rome for Raphael and to Madrid for Velazquez and Titian and to Venice for Jacopo Robusti whom men still call the Little Dyer (Tintoretto). In London we have one painting on wood, “Christ and the Pharisees,” brought from the Borghese Palace in Rome. The head of Christ is strangely feminine, the four Pharisees round him are finely painted, and the picture has probably been attributed to Leonardo da Vinci at some period of its career. There are three frescoes in South Kensington and a few panel pictures in private collections. The Louvre is more fortunate than our National Gallery, it has several frescoes and two or three panels. In Switzerland, in the Church of St. Mary and the Angels in Lugano, is a wonderful screen picture of the “Passion of Christ” with some hundreds of figures in it, and the rest of Luini’s work seems to be in Italy. The greater part is to be found in Milan, some important frescoes having been brought to the Brera from the house of the Pelucca family in Monza, while there are some important works in Florence in the Pitti and Uffizi Galleries. In the Church of St. Peter at Luino on the shores of Lake Maggiore, the little town where Benardino was born and from which he took his name, there are some frescoes but they are in a very faded condition. The people of the lake side town have much to say about the master who has made Luino a place of pilgrimage but their stories are quite unreliable.

PLATE III.—SALOMÉ AND THE HEAD OF ST. JOHN THE BAPTIST

(In the Uffizi Gallery, Florence)

In this striking and finely preserved picture Bernardino Luini has contrived to avoid all sense of horror. The head of the dead John the Baptist is full of beauty, and even Herodias is handled without any attempt to make her repulsive. Sufficient contrast is supplied by the executioner on the right.