yet we turn away disappointed from the crowded,
dazzling, stupefying wilderness of forms and faces on these mighty
walls.

All that Ferrari derived from actual life--the heads of single
figures, the powerful movement of men and women in excited action, the
monumental pose of two praying nuns--is admirably rendered. His angels
too, in S. Cristoforo as elsewhere, are quite original; not only in
their type of beauty, which is terrestrial and peculiar to Ferrari,
without a touch of Correggio's sensuality; but also in the intensity
of their emotion, the realisation of their vitality. Those which hover
round the Cross in the fresco of the 'Crucifixion' are as passionate
as any angels of the Giottesque masters in Assisi. Those again which
crowd the Stable of Bethlehem in the 'Nativity' yield no point of
idyllic charm to Gozzoli's in the Riccardi Chapel.

The 'Crucifixion' and the 'Assumption of Madonna' are very tall
and narrow compositions, audacious in their attempt to fill almost
unmanageable space with a connected action. Of the two frescoes the
'Crucifixion,' which has points of strong similarity to the same
subject at Varallo, is by far the best. Ferrari never painted anything
at once truer to life and nobler in tragic style than the fainting
Virgin. Her face expresses the very acme of martyrdom--not exaggerated
nor spasmodic, but real and sublime--in the suffering of a stately
matron. In points like this Ferrari cannot be surpassed. Raphael could
scarcely have done better; besides, there is an air of sincerity, a
stamp of popular truth, in this episode, which lies beyond Raphael's
sphere. It reminds us rather of Tintoretto.

After the 'Crucifixion,' I place the 'Adoration of the Magi,' full
of fine mundane motives and gorgeous costumes; then the 'Sposalizio'
(whose marriage, I am not certain), the only grandly composed picture
of the series, and marked by noble heads; then the 'Adoration of
the Shepherds,' with two lovely angels holding the bambino. The
'Assumption of the Magdalen'--for which fresco there is a valuable
cartoon in the Albertina Collection at Turin--must have been a fine
picture; but it is ruined now. An oil altar-piece in the choir of the
same church struck me less than the frescoes. It represents Madonna
and a crowd of saints under an orchard of apple-trees, with cherubs
curiously flung about almost at random in the air. The motive of the
orchard is prettily conceived and carried out with spirit.