master-works of the great Tuscan whom Cardinal Branda da Castiglione found at work in S. Clemente in Rome. The first modern critics to write of these paintings were the almost infallible Crowe and Caval caselle.1 Vasari does not mention them, and, as it seems, they were quite unknown when in the end of the eighteenth century, the church being very dark, they were covered with whitewash and were only uncovered in 1843.

It has been reserved for a critic of our own time to make a further discovery. For, as it happened, Mr. Berenson came to Castiglione not long ago and found in the Palazzo Castiglione here a great frieze running round the great hall consisting of four frescoes from the master's hand. Three of these had been whitewashed, but in that which had escaped he found one of the finest and one of the most surprising things in all Tuscan art of the quattrocento: "nothing less than a vast landscape, a sort of panorama of the Alps, with a broad torrent rushing down to the plain." Was it Cardinal Branda, who so loved those great hills he could see from his house, or Masolino himself, who, Tuscan as he was, looking upon them for the first time, gave himself suddenly to them and recorded here for ever his sudden and overwhelming joy? We shall never know only, as Mr. Berenson says, "let us cease talking about the late date at which in Italy landscape began to be treated on its own account."

It is hard to tear oneself away from so charming and quiet a place as Castiglione d'Olona, nor are the Masolinos there, even in the matter of works of art, the only things to be seen and to be loved. In the Church of the Rosary is the tomb of Cardinal Branda by Leonardo Griffo, made in 1443. Then that steep, stony and delicious way in the shadow of the walls of gardens which leads down from the Collegiata, where

1 See Crowe and Cavalcaselle, History of Painting in Italy (Ed. Hutton, 1909), vol. ii. p. 218. Originally published 1860.

the old castello stood, into the village brings us to the Chiesa di Villa, a charming Renaissance building, having outside two huge statues in stone of S. Christopher and S. Antony the Hermit. Within is another Castiglione tomb, that of Guido, who died in 1485.

But the true delight of Castiglione is the country, those wooded hills and valleys and streams that abound there, the byways that are as lovely as any in Lombardy, and the fragrant simplicity and honesty that one meets everywhere thereabout. Yet the road calls and we must follow it, at first to Venegono and then, either afoot or by train, to Saronno and to Milan.

Saronno, which lies in the plain about half-way between Castiglione and Milan, is known to all Italy for its cheese, but to us wayfarers for its Santuario della Madonna di Saronno, at the end of an avenue of planes, where Luini and Gaudenzio Ferrari painted their best and most charming works. The church itself is an early Renaissance building by Pietro dell' Orto, and has a charming bell tower by Paolo Porta; its façade, however, is baroque of the seventeenth century. It is for Luini and Gaudenzio Ferrari, however, that we are come.

Let us make no mistake about it, we shall not discover in the pictures or series of pictures of the Lombard painters any of that delight we are wont to feel in the work of the Tuscans or of the Venetian masters. Lombardy expressed herself in architecture rather than in painting, and the pupils of Leonardo the Florentine are the very last to whom we should go to find what painting really amounted to in Lombardy. Gaudenzio Ferrari, it is true, suffered perhaps less than the rest from Leonardo's overwhelming genius, but though he manages to keep something of the energy of the mountaineer, of his coarse strength and original virtue, he succumbs at last to that disease of prettiness from which all that company suffered so grievously. Nor is Luini himself exempt: rather is he the chief among

the sick. His intellect seems to have lost itself under the weight of Leonardo's ideas which he could not understand, and nothing but his gentleness and love of fair women have saved him from an affected mediocrity. How pretty and how charming they are with their sweet, wan smiles, those girls he shows us as Salome or S. Catherine or the Blessed Virgin herself. These people are the ghosts of a ghost seen between sleeping and waking, but the life and the life-giver died with Leonardo.

Saronno is the first town on our road that is truly of the plain. The thirty miles between it and Milan lead us farther and farther from the hills, till all is lost in the immensity of that waveless plain which is Lombardy. As the traveller pursues his way-it may be towards evening, towards sunset, and on into the twilight-into this emptiness, nothing will impress him so much as the infinity of this vastness all about him, without features of any kind, without the silence of the mountains or their exaltation, but with something of their mastery and their opposition. Nor can any other experience he may have teach him so well the character of the plain as this thirty-mile walk from Saronno to the capital. It is true that from Monte Generoso the greater part of this tremendous plain is spread out before his eyes, but from that high place he but knows it with his mind: on the road he will suffer it, and his weariness, unrelieved by surprise, or the exaltation of the hills, will teach him, as nothing else can, the brutal strength of this unexpected bastion which guards Italy between the mountains and the mountains. In the dusk the beauty of the way, of the fields, of the vineyards is lost, and nothing but the sense of space, of emptiness and an incredible distance remains to him. It is so I would have him come to the iron city of Milan.