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 structure that need not be described.  Simple and severe, S. Maurizio owes its architectural beauty wholly and entirely to purity of line and perfection of proportion.  There is a prevailing spirit of repose, a sense of space, fair, lightsome, and adapted to serene moods of the meditative fancy in this building, which is singularly at variance with the religious mysticism and imaginative grandeur of a Gothic edifice.  The principal beauty of the church, however, is its tone of colour.  Every square inch is covered with fresco or rich woodwork, mellowed by time into that harmony of tints which blends the work of greater and lesser artists in one golden hue of brown.  Round the arcades of the convent-loggia run delicate arabesques with faces of fair female saints—­Catherine, Agnes, Lucy, Agatha,—­gem-like or star-like,