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Of Moretto and Romanino, whose works thus light up, or refine, the dark churches of Brescia and its neighbourhood, Romanino is scarcely to be seen beyond it. The National Gallery, however, is rich in Moretto’s work, with two of his rare poetic portraits; and if the large altar-picture would hardly tell his secret to one who had not studied him at Brescia, in those who already know him it will awake many a reminiscence of his art at its best. The three white mitres, for instance, grandly painted towards the centre of the picture, at the feet of Saint Bernardino of Siena–the three bishoprics refused by that lowly saint–may remind one of the great white mitre which, in the genial picture of Saint Nicholas, in the Miracoli at Brescia, one of the children, who as delightfully unconventional acolytes accompany their beloved patron into the presence of the Madonna, carries along so willingly, laughing almost, with pleasure and pride, at his part in so great a function. In the altar-piece at the National Gallery those white mitres form the key-note from which the pale, cloistral splendours of the whole picture radiate. You see what a wealth of enjoyable colour Moretto, for one, can bring out of monkish habits in themselves sad enough, and receive a new lesson in the artistic value of reserve.

Rarer still (the single work of Romanino, it is said, to be seen out of Italy) is the elaborate composition in five parts on the opposite side of the doorway. Painted for the high-altar of one of the many churches of Brescia, it seems to have passed into secular hands about a century ago. Alessandro, patron of the church, one of the many youthful patrician converts Italy reveres from the ranks of the Roman army, stands there on one side, with ample crimson banner superbly furled about his lustrous black armour, and on the other–Saint Jerome, Romanino’s own namesake–neither more nor less than the familiar, self-tormenting anchorite; for few painters (Bellini, to some degree, in his picture of the saint’s study) have perceived the rare pictorial opportunities of Jerome; Jerome with the true cradle of the Lord, first of Christian antiquaries, author of the fragrant Vulgate version of the Scriptures. Alessandro and Jerome support the Mother and the Child in the central place. But the loveliest subjects of this fine group of compositions are in the corners above, half-length, life-sized figures–Gaudioso, Bishop of Brescia, above Saint Jerome; above Alessandro, Saint Filippo Benizzi, meek founder of the Order of Servites to which that church at Brescia belonged, with his lily, and in the right hand a book; and what a book! It was another very different painter, Giuseppe Caletti, of Cremona, who, for the truth and beauty of his drawing of them, gained the title of the “Painter of Books.” But if you wish to see what can be made of the leaves, the vellum cover, of a book, observe that in Saint Philip’s hand.–The writer? the contents? you ask: What may they be? and whence did it come?–out of embalmed sacristy, or antique coffin of some early Brescian martyr, or, through that bright space of blue Italian sky, from the hands of an angel, like his Annunciation lily, or the book received in the Apocalypse by John the Divine? It is one of those old saints, Gaudioso (at home in every church in Brescia), who looks out with full face from the opposite corner of the altar-piece, from a background which, though it might be the new heaven over a new earth, is in truth only the proper, breathable air of Italy. As we see him here, Saint Gaudioso is one of the more exquisite treasures of our National Gallery. It was thus that at the magic touch of Romanino’s art the dim, early, hunted-down Brescian church of the primitive centuries, crushed into the dust, it might seem, was “brought to her king,” out of those old dark crypts, “in raiment of needle-work”–the delicate, richly folded, pontifical white vestments, the mitre and staff and gloves, and rich jewelled cope, blue or green. The face, of remarkable beauty after a type which all feel though it is actually rare in art, is probably a portrait of some distinguished churchman of Romanino’s own day; a second Gaudioso, perhaps, setting that later Brescian church to rights after the terrible French occupation in the painter’s own time, as his saintly predecessor, the Gaudioso of the earlier century here commemorated, had done after the invasion of the Goths. The eloquent eyes are open upon some glorious vision. “He hath made us kings and priests!” they seem to say for him, as the clean, sensitive lips might do so eloquently. Beauty and Holiness had “kissed each other,” as in Borgognone’s imperial deacons at the Certosa. At the Renaissance the world might seem to have parted them again. But here certainly, once more, Catholicism and the Renaissance, religion and culture, holiness and beauty, might seem reconciled, by one who had conceived neither after any feeble way, in a gifted person. Here at least, by the skill of Romanino’s hand, the obscure martyr of the crypts shines as a saint of the later Renaissance, with a sanctity of which the elegant world itself would hardly escape the fascination, and which reminds one how the great Apostle Saint Paul has made courtesy part of the content of the Divine charity itself. A Rubens in Italy!–so Romanino has been called. In this gracious presence we might think that, like Rubens also, he had been a courtier.