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The only painter who approaches Luini in what may be called the Lombard, to distinguish it from the Venetian idyll, is Sodoma; and the work of his which comes nearest to Luini's masterpieces is the legend of S. Benedict, at Monte Oliveto, near Siena. Yet Sodoma had not all Luini's innocence or naïveté.

S. Bernardino, the great preacher and peace-maker of the Middle Ages; S. Catherine, the worthiest of all women to be canonised; the blessed Colombini, who founded the Order of the Gesuati or Brothers of the Poor in Christ; the blessed Bernardo, who founded that of Monte Oliveto; were all Sienese. Few cities have given four such saints to modern Christendom.

He also made a beginning with the decorations in the Refectory of S. Giorgio, a seat of the Monks of Monte Oliveto at Ferrara, and executed a great part of them; but he left the work unfinished, and it has been completed in our own day by Pellegrino Pellegrini, a painter of Bologna.

Called to graver work at Orvieto, where he painted his gigantic series of frescoes illustrating the coming of Antichrist, the Destruction of the World, the Resurrection, the Last Judgment, and the final state of souls in Paradise and Hell, Signorelli left his work at Monte Oliveto unaccomplished. Seven years later it was taken up by a painter of very different genius.

The roof of the Monte Oliveto market, fronting on the Toledo, the main thoroughfare, had suddenly crushed in, burying more than 200 people beneath its heavy fall.

The long- drawn rural road I refer to, stretching over hill and dale and to which I devoted the whole of the longest day of the year I was in a small single-horse conveyance, of which I had already made appreciative use, and with a driver as disposed as myself ever to sacrifice speed to contemplation is doubtless familiar now with the rush of the motor-car; the thought of whose free dealings with the solitude of Monte Oliveto makes me a little ruefully reconsider, I confess, the spirit in which I have elsewhere in these pages, on behalf of the lust, the landscape lust, of the eyes, acknowledged our general increasing debt to that vehicle.

Raffaello then painted for the Monastery of the Monks of Monte Oliveto, called S. Maria dello Spasmo, at Palermo, a panel-picture of Christ bearing the Cross, which is held to be a marvellous work.

For S. Nazzaro, also in Brescia, he executed certain works, and others for S. Celso, which are passing good, and an altar-piece for S. Piero in Oliveto, which is full of charm.

I do not mean these lists to be in any sense exhaustive, but simply to remind the reader of the rare and many-sided men of genius who devoted their abilities to this kind of work. Some of their masterpieces will be noticed in detail in the chapter on Sculpture. Especially his work at Monte Oliveto, near Siena, and in the church of Monte Oliveto at Naples.

Monte Oliveto comes in sight a mass of red brick, backed up with cypresses, among dishevelled earthy precipices, balze as they are called upon the hill below the village of Chiusure. This Chiusure was once a promising town; but the life was crushed out of it in the throes of mediæval civil wars, and since the thirteenth century it has been dwindling to a hamlet.