e refinement. At first sight it seems
a wilderness of loveliest reliefs and statues--of angel faces,
fluttering raiment, flowing hair, love-laden youths, and stationary
figures of grave saints, mid wayward tangles of acanthus and wild vine
and cupid-laden foliage; but the subordination of these decorative
details to the main design, clear, rhythmical, and lucid, like a
chaunt of Pergolese or Stradella, will enrapture one who has the
sense for unity evoked from divers elements, for thought subduing all
caprices to the harmony of beauty. It is not possible elsewhere in
Italy to find the instinct of the earlier Renaissance, so amorous in
its expenditure of rare material, so lavish in its bestowal of the
costliest workmanship on ornamental episodes, brought into truer
keeping with a pure and simple structural effect.

All the great sculptor-architects of Lombardy worked in succession
on this miracle of beauty; and this may account for the sustained
perfection of style, which nowhere suffers from the languor of
exhaustion in the artist or from repetition of motives. It remains the
triumph of North Italian genius, exhibiting qualities of tenderness
and self-abandonment to inspiration, which we lack in the severer
masterpieces of the Tuscan school.

To Borgognone is assigned the painting of the roof in nave and
choir--exceeding rich, varied, and withal in sympathy with stately
Gothic style. Borgognone again is said to have designed the saints and
martyrs worked in _tarsia_ for the choir-stalls. His frescoes are
in some parts well preserved, as in the lovely little Madonna at the
end of the south chapel, while the great fresco above the window in
the south transept has an historical value that renders it interesting
in spite of partial decay. Borgognone's oil pictures throughout
the church prove, if such proof were needed after inspection of the
altar-piece in our National Gallery, that he was one of the most
powerful and original painters of Italy, blending the repose of the
earlier masters and their consummate workmanship with a profound
sensibility to the finest shades of feeling and the rarest forms of
natural beauty. He selected an exquisite type of face for his young
men and women; on his old men he bestowed singular gravity and
dignity. His saints are a society of strong, pure, restful, earnest
souls, in whom the passion of deepest emotion is transfigured by
habitual calm. The brown and golden harmonies he loved, are g