Bernardino Luini

📖 The Scoop

"Bernardino Luini " by James Mason is a biography of Bernardino Luini (1480-1532) who was a North Italian painter from Leonardo's circle during the High Renaissance. Both Luini and Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio were said to have worked with Leonardo directly; he was described as having taken "as much from Leonardo as his native roots enabled him to comprehend". Consequently, many of his works were attributed to Leonardo. He was known especially for his graceful female figures with elongated eyes, called Luinesque by Vladimir Nabokov. Excerpt: "Bernardino Luini, the subject of this little study, calls us away from the great art centres—from Venice and Florence and Rome; his record was made and is to be found to-day amid the plains of Lombardy. Milan is not always regarded as one of the great art centres of Italy in spite of the Brera, the Ambrosiana, and the Poldi Pezzoli Palace collections, but no lover of pictures ever went for the first time to the galleries of Milan in a reverent spirit and with a patient eye without feeling that he had discovered a painter of genius."

Genre: Fiction / Classics (fancy, right?)