caused him some anxiety, since he did not think it possible to imagine a form of feature that should properly render the countenance of a man who after so many benefits received from his Master had possessed a heart so depraved as to be capable of betraying his Lord and the Creator of the world; with regard to that second, however, he would make search, and after allif he could find no better-he need never be at any great loss, for there would always be the head of that troublesome and impertinent Prior. This made the Duke laugh with all his heart, and he declared Leonardo to be completely in the right; and the wretched Prior, utterly confounded, went away, to drive on the digging in his garden, and left Leonardo in peace. The head of Judas was then finished so successfully that it is indeed the true image of treachery and wickedness; but that of the Redeemer remained, as we have said, incomplete."

There can be no one, I suppose, who comes on an autumn afternoon into that beautiful refectory and looks upon the ruin of one of the greatest works of all time who does not recall that excellent and immortal story of the artist and his patron. And indeed the tale is a godsend, for it helps to relieve us in our grief at the ruin of so marvellous and beautiful a thing. This ruin is not altogether the work of soldiers and restorers. To Leonardo himself, in his insatiable desire for experiment, is due much of the destruction we see. For the master did not here employ the old and tried method of fresco, in which his countrymen had excelled for ages, and much of which is still almost as fresh as the day on which it was uncovered. He employed a method of his own, painting, on a damp and humid wall, in oil, so that he might return again and again, to the most inestimable of his works. This would have doomed it even in careful hands; as it is, the convent has been subjected to every sort of rough usage, both in peace and war. The soldiers of Francis 1. are in part to blame, but to the

cleaning and repainting of restorers we are even more indebted for the ruin we see, while the friars seem to have thought so little of the precious thing they held in trust for humanity that they drove a door through it in the midst. Little thus remains to us but the composition of Leonardo, and that is of an incomparable beauty and rhythm.

Vasari twice asserts that the head of Christ was left uncompleted by Leonardo, yet it seems to us to be as perfectly finished as those of the Apostles, which Vasari asserts were completed by Leonardo himself. It is probable, then, that another hand has been at work here from very early times, and that the head of Christ, which still seems to us a miracle, a ghost seen through the wall, is but Leonardo's in general outline and suggestion. Even so, it is one of the most marvellous and moving apparitions in all Italy.

The chief interest in S. Maria delle Grazie is of course to be found in this work of Leonardo's, but the church should by no means be neglected. The façade and the nave, the earliest parts of it, were new in Leonardo's day, they are in the Gothic style of 1470, but the choir and the cupola are work of the Renaissance, and it would seem partly from the very hand of Bramante. Bramante's first work in Milan was the transept of S. Maria presso S. Satiro, his second was the choir and cupola of this Church of S. Mary of the Graces. The lower half of the choir and transept only is certainly the master's work, but the plan and composition of the rest are his, though the work has been badly carried out, and all is covered up with modern plaster within. Without, however, we see a work of the early Renaissance in all its charm, and are reminded once again that however eager we may be to denounce the iniquity and brutality of the Sforzas, it is after all to them we owe the presence in Milan of these two great artists, Leonardo da Vinci and Bramante d'Urbino, without

whom our pleasure in her would be how much less full than it is.

MILAN IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY

In the work of the strangers, Leonardo da Vinci and Bramante d'Urbino, Milan not only received the most beautiful works of art she possesses, but in those brief thirty years from 1472 to 1500 she was more famous than she was ever again to be in the history of Italian

art.

The period of invasion, war, disaster and confusion, which caused the fall of the Sforza dynasty and reduced Milan to a foreign yoke, may not have interfered very greatly with her growth, or even with her mere material prosperity, but it was barren of great buildings and of works of art, and when the city finally emerges as the property of a foreign Government the old and gracious time has passed away, and it is a new spirit we see in all the profuse work that was then begun, and which even yet so largely gives Milan her sumptuous if melancholy character.

In 1527 a new circle of walls was built about her; in 1549 yet another was begun, but it is in the palaces, courts and churches of the Perugian Alessi (1512-72), of Vincenzo Seregno (1509-94) and of the Bolognese Pellegrino Tibaldi (1521-92) that we recognise the Milan of the sixteenth century, the Milan of S. Carlo Borromeo. The beautiful Palazzo Marini, now the Municipio, is perhaps the most charming of these buildings, and is one of the best things Alessio ever achieved, possessing as it does in its façade and its court something of the allure of the early Renaissance. The church of S. Vittore, built in 1560, with a simple exterior, and the façade of S. Maria presso Celso, are imposing, but have not the same delight.

It is the Genoese and less lovely work of Alessio that is recalled to us by the work of Seregno in the Palazzo della Giustizia, the Palazzo dei Giurisconsulti, and the Collegio de' Nobili in the Piazza de' Mercanti, built in 1564. But the architect of Milan in the time of S. Carlo was Pellegrino Tibaldi, the creator of the façade of the Cathedral, which, as he designed it, was so much finer than the Later Gothic which surrounded it. To this master we owe the beautiful Church of S. Fedele, a work of almost classic beauty which had a great influence then and later, an influence we see in the Church of S. Gaudenzio at Novara. But S. Fedele does not stand alone in Milan; we may place beside it as the work of this master the round Church of S. Sebastiano, built in 1576, a plague church, and one of the courts of the Episcopal Palace, which is simple and severe, as indeed S. Carlo wished it, and to some extent the Palace itself as we see it. At the same time, Giuseppe Meda was also working in Milan, and to him we owe the beautiful court of the Seminario.

S. Carlo, to whom in Milan the second half of the sixteenth century, the period of the Catholic Reaction, may be said to belong, died in 1584, and after an interval of eleven years he was succeeded by his nephew, Cardinal Federigo. To the second Borromeo archbishop Milan owes what she possesses of the baroque, but her chief debt to him lies in the fact that he founded the Ambrosian Library. The Biblioteca Ambrosiana was built to contain the collection in 1603 by Fabio Manzone, to whom we also owe the Palazzo del Senato. The library is one of the most important in Europe, not only for its priceless collection of MSS., its autograph letters of Petrarch, Lucrezia Borgia, Ariosto, Tasso and Galileo, its volume of drawings by Leonardo, its Virgil annotated by the hand of Petrarch, but also for its splendid incunabula. Here, too, on the ground floor, are parts of the beautiful tomb of Gaston de Foix, other