BECAUSE OF the activity of the Arundel Society Saronno was less unfamiliar to a Victorian audience than it is today. Too close to Milan for comfort, the town itself has no claims on the tourist. But on its northern fringe is one of the most beautiful sanctuaries of northern Italy, the Madonna dei Miracoli. A miracle of 1447 led to the construction of the church, begun in 1498 to the design of the versatile Giovanni Antonio Amadeo, whose scheme for the sanctuary itself was realized. Work on the church followed, and the subtle classical west façade projected by Pellegrino Tibaldi at the behest of San Carlo Borromeo was only completed in 1612.
But satisfying as the building is, it is for the frescoes by Bernardino Luini and Gaudenzio Ferrari that this is most remarkable. Pass through the church to reach the sanctuary. On the cupola Gaudenzio painted a Concert of Angels in 1534–6, a swirling interwoven composition, the unceasing movement of which seems almost deliberately to challenge the more static mode of Luini, who had died in 1532. On the left is the Cappella del Cenacolo, for which Andrea da Milano supplied an effective and characteristically Lombard polychrome group of the Last Supper.
Beyond, at the entrance to the Anticappella, are frescoes of four saints by Luini, finished in the year of his death. More remarkable is Luini’s work in the Anticappella, with large compositions of the Marriage of the Virgin and Christ among the Doctors. Luini was aware that these would be seen laterally by pilgrims bound for the Cappella della Madonna beyond. Here the painter pulls out every stop. The lateral murals, the Circumcision of 1525 – in the background of which the Holy Family sets out for Egypt passing an accurate representation of the sanctuary and campanile from the east – and the Adoration of the Magi, whose train winds down through the landscape, are projected though arches which are shown from a position just within the chapel; there are Sibyls in the spandrels of the arches and in the lunettes above, and on those of the other walls the Evangelists are paired with the Doctors of the Church. Wind may ruffle the palm tree in the Circumcision yet Luini’s dignified classicism is immutable. This and his discursive narrative taste help to explain why the Arundel Society went to the not inconsiderable expense of reproducing the Saronno frescoes. The very sobriety of Luini’s types reminds us that he was an early exponent of the ‘Lombard realism’ that some seventy years later would be the springboard for the artistic revolution wrought by Caravaggio. Luini responded to the challenge of the commission, but may have found it more congenial to paint the less orchestrated lunette of the Nativity in the cloister. In the words of a wise fellow guest to whom I once showed these, the murals at Saronno are indeed ‘perfectly marvellous’.
Madonna dei Miracoli: Bernardino Luini, Christ among the Doctors, fresco (detail), 1525.
Madonna dei Miracoli: Bernardino Luini, Adoration of the Magi, fresco, a Page (detail), 1525.
