parts of which are in the Castello, and a fresco by Luini of a Christ crowned with Thorns in the hall of the Confraternity of the Holy Crown, which used to meet here.

For the ordinary traveller, however, the chief interest of the Ambrosiana will be found in the Pinacoteca on the first floor, where, amid much of purely Milanese or of mediocre interest, will be found a Madonna and Child with Angels (72) by Botticelli, a Madonna enthroned with Saints and Angels by Borgognone (54), a Portrait painted in 1554 by Moroni (312), Raphael's cartoon for the School of Athens in the Vatican, and best of all the famous Portrait by Ambrogio de Predis of Bianca Maria Sforza, and the unfinished Portrait of a Young Man which matches it so delightfully. It is a very various collection of pictures we find here, and as such is extraordinarily indicative of the conditions of art in Milan, where almost all the greatest work was done by foreigners for the reigning foreign houses of Visconti, Sforza, France and Spain. The Latin population of Milan, always so great in energy and life, might seem to have expressed itself in art very little or not at all. We see its work, perhaps, in the earlier great churches, such as S. Lorenzo and S. Ambrogio, and certainly its influence in the spaciousness of the Cathedral, a true Latin delight victorious there in spite of everything; but in painting as in sculpture Milan has little to give us, and like all Lombardy for that matter, nothing at all of the first class. We may explain this how we can, the fact remains. The two greatest masters whose work is to be found in Milan are Leonardo and Bramante. Leonardo undoubtedly founded a school, but it came to nothing and produced nothing of any real importance, possessed of any real life. His advent in Milan was as disastrous as the advent of Handel in England. It was much the same with Bramante; he came and he went, leaving behind him a few lovely and priceless things, and a tradition which

no one who was Milanese knew how to follow or to use. It is for the most part the beautiful work of Italy we admire and search after in Milan, for Cisalpine Gaul has scarcely expressed herself there. She is dumb in this great and tumultuous town, for in truth she is afar off, singing in the fields under the limitless sky.

THE GALLERIES

When we consider Cisalpine Gaul, and note the riches of the great plain, its deep and and fertile meadows, the number and splendour of its cities, the energy of its inhabitants, we might expect to find there one of the most flourishing schools of art in all Italy, for painting especially must have had every encouragement in a country so wealthy and so civilised as this; and in the city of Milan, the true metropolis of this country, the greatest and the richest city between the Alps and the Apennines, we might have expected to find the citadel and the home of a school of painters at least as flourishing as those of Florence or Siena. What in fact we find is that neither Milan nor all Lombardy ever produced a painter of the first rank at all.

If we try to explain this fact, we are compelled to do so on first principles. An examination of the works of the Lombard painters forces us to the conclusion that the reason why Lombardy never produced a great school of painters was that she was almost entirely lacking in artistic sense. What she achieved in art was not essentially artistic: it was realistic, it was decorative, it was charmingly pretty by turns, but as art pure and simple it had no life in it.

On the very threshold of our inquiry we are met by the fact that no great personality appeared within her borders, as Giotto did in the north and Duccio in the south of Tuscany, to inspire, and to direct the national

genius, and to determine what its future was to be. In Lombardy there was no national genius that naturally expressed itself in painting, and the first painters we find between the Alps and the Apennines are the merest provincial followers of Giotto, and indeed we may go so far as to assert that there does not exist a single picture in all this country which does not owe its origin to Florence, if it be living and not dead.

Without any genuine native talent for art, without what we may call artistic temperament, and, for this reason, unable to produce a great artistic personality and tradition, Lombardy of necessity fell back upon Giotto-that is to say, upon a genius and an influence foreign to her. What followed might seem to have been inevitable. Cisalpine Gaul was not Italy, and therefore was not able to make as much use of what was being done in Tuscany as, for instance, Umbria was. Without a real and native artistic impulse, she imitated what should have inspired her, and treated living principles as a dead code to be rigidly kept or a dead beauty to be brutally copied. If, before coming to the specifically Lombard school, we glance at the earlier North Italian masters, this will be at once obvious in their work.

The first of these was Altichiero of Verona (1330-95), an imitator of Giotto, a master whose work is bewildering, because, almost like an amateur, his virtues will not chime with his faults, his work is often too good to be as bad as it is, his faults are so fundamental that we are astonished at his virtues. Nothing of his remains west of the Mincio.

His follower, Pisanello of Verona (1385-1455), had the excellent good fortune to come under the influence of the Umbrian Gentile da Fabriano. A great and an individual genius, he was the first man to found a school in such a world as this of North Italy. In the man as we know him he is a court painter, and lovely as his work