sit and watch the
water-snakes, the busy rats, the hundred creatures swarming in the fat
well-watered soil. Nightingales here and there, new-comers, tune their
timid April song: but, strangest of all sounds in such a place, my
comrade from the Grisons jodels forth an Alpine cowherd's melody.
_Auf den Alpen droben ist ein herrliches Leben!_

Did the echoes of Gian Galeazzo's convent ever wake to such a tune as
this before?

SAN MAURIZIO

The student of art in Italy, after mastering the characters of
different styles and epochs, finds a final satisfaction in the
contemplation of buildings designed and decorated by one master, or
by groups of artists interpreting the spirit of a single period. Such
supreme monuments of the national genius are not very common, and they
are therefore the more precious. Giotto's Chapel at Padua; the Villa
Farnesina at Rome, built by Peruzzi and painted in fresco by Raphael
and Sodoma; the Palazzo del Te at Mantua, Giulio Romano's masterpiece;
the Scuola di San Rocco, illustrating the Venetian Renaissance at its
climax, might be cited among the most splendid of these achievements.
In the church of the Monastero Maggiore at Milan, dedicated to S.
Maurizio, Lombard architecture and fresco-painting may be studied
in this rare combination. The monastery itself, one of the oldest in
Milan, formed a retreat for cloistered virgins following the rule of
S. Benedict. It may have been founded as early as the tenth century;
but its church was rebuilt in the first two decades of the sixteenth,
between 1503 and 1519, and was immediately afterwards decorated with
frescoes by Luini and his pupils. Gian Giacomo Dolcebono, architect
and sculptor, called by his fellow-craftsmen _magistro di taliare
pietre_, gave the design, at once simple and harmonious, which was
carried out with hardly any deviation from his plan. The church is a
long parallelogram, divided into two unequal portions, the first and
smaller for the public, the second for the nuns. The walls are pierced
with rounded and pilastered windows, ten on each side, four of which
belong to the outer and six to the inner section. The dividing wall or
septum rises to the point from which the groinings of the roof spring;
and round three sides of the whole building, north, east, and south,
runs a gallery for the use of the convent. The altars of the inner and
outer church are placed against the septum, back to back, with certain
differences of structur