_The Duomo_
“The far-famed Cathedral of Milan, which men call the eighth wonder of
the world.”
In Milan, as we see the city to-day, modernised, commonplace,
characterlessly handsome, there is one great redeeming thing—the
Cathedral. Other churches there are, greater and more beautiful in every
sense except size, but they are smothered in the dull drift of everyday
buildings. The Duomo, as is befitting, has a supreme position. It is the
heart of the city, the converging point of all the far-coming ways, the
irresistible magnet for the eyes of the myriads thronging those ways. It
rises up in its immense stature above the petty interests and activities
of the crowds at its base, an embodied exhalation of the holy spirit of
man, a witness to the irrepressible upward flight of his thoughts and to
his eternal need of beauty and light.
The impression which a traveller coming from the station first receives
of the Duomo is of a vast ethereal presence at the end of the long
street, so light, so cloud-like, so delicate that it seems to be no
temple piled up slowly by men’s hands to the measure of their prayers,
but a fabric of some upper sphere, built of air and dreams. Broad set in
its main proportions, it gives high and ample seat to the swelling
contour of the cupola, which a hundred pinnacles guard like serried
spears, pointing into the upper blue around the spring of the midmost
spire. In the silvery light of afternoon it appears a shadowy forest of
upward-springing shafts, with sharp gleams along edges and salient
lines. The details are lost in a soft mass, and the atmosphere casts
over all a veil of illusion. Through such a veil this famous Cathedral
of Milan is best seen and best understood.
In the view of the whole building from the great Piazza on the west
side, its faults are more apparent—the inadequacy and insignificance of
the cupola, or central tower, the incongruity of the façade, the
extravagance of the ornamentation. Nevertheless, the huge white marble
pile has always majesty and splendour, if only from its size and
material and the amazing number of its airy embroideries and fripperies
of stone. It has a magic, unearthly beauty of colour, silver, dove-like,
rosy against the blue, according to the changing light of the day—most
wonderful in the strange, pale, clear moment when the sun has just set.
An exotic in this flat country of the alluvial soil, where brick is the
natural medium for the builder, it seems to bring into the hot and
stifling city at midsummer a cooling breath from that marble cave close
to Lago Maggiore whence its material was drawn. One could almost believe
that it was the dripping of water through countless ages which had built
up its clear substance into those strange fantastic shapes, those spires
and fretted edges and fairy shafts.
Their Cathedral is the pride and joy of the Milanese. Yet not so much
this billowy heap of stone, but the spot upon which it stands should be
consecrate to their hearts. None of the noblest memories of their past
sanctify the church which Gian Galeazzo Visconte founded, which opened
its doors with equal welcome to Francesco Sforza, the usurper, and to
French and Spanish and Austrian conquerors by turn, and which was
finished by Napoleon Buonaparte. But the ancient, half-ruined church,
which Gian Galeazzo pulled down to make room for his new temple,
enshrined the dearer history of Milan’s liberty. Sta. Maria Maggiore, as
it was then called, was the representative through many transformations
of that _basilica nuova intramuros_ in which Ambrose entrenched himself
in his great struggle with the Empress Justina and achieved his victory
for the new organisation of the Church, protector of the people, over
the corrupt despotism of the Empire. And if what is one of the spiritual
events of the world’s history must be fixed in time and place, it was no
doubt at the gates of this, the chief church, that Ambrose interposed
his hand between the blood-stained Emperor and the altar of Christ. In
later centuries, in the figures of the enthusiasts Arialdo and
Erlembaldo, of the courageous Peter Damian, fronting the excited and
hostile multitudes, the memories of the old Cathedral church were still
of the victory of the spirit over the forces of the world, of liberty
over oppression, of a new order of things over the corrupt system of the
past. And in the early days of the Milanese Republic the church was
closely associated with the life and struggles of the people. All
business, public and private, was transacted in the piazza outside. The
portico of the church was the house of parliament, and the politics of
the city were sanctified by the benediction of religion. The chief
priest was likewise the head of the people, and the pastoral staff which
topped the lofty Campanile stood for temporal as well as spiritual
dominion. In times of peace the Sacred Car was housed within the church,
and in the church those warlike decisions were taken which occasioned it
to be drawn forth that it might go in the midst of the host against the
enemy.
But the noblest moment in the story of the old Cathedral was its
restoration after the ruin of the city by Barbarossa in 1166. The
ruthless destruction of the Campanile, a tower _of such marvellous
beauty, such great breadth and admirable altitude that there was said to
be none other like it in Italy_, had wrecked it in great part. The
labour of the men, the jewels of the women, went to the rebuilding, till
the church stood up once more in the midst of the re-risen city, defying
the destroyer.
With the building of the present Duomo all the vestiges of those ancient
and good days were swept away. Milan’s liberty was gone, and the church
which symbolised it, both in association and in its Lombard style of
architecture, had been allowed to become half-ruinous. The population
had outgrown the capacity of the church, and in their rapidly growing
wealth and importance it was natural that prince and people should
desire a cathedral more suited to their condition. So the old building
fell for ever.
The citizens acquiesced in the scheme for a new Cathedral, but the
enormous temple which rose on the site of the old one, the Duomo of
to-day, was the conception of Gian Galeazzo Visconte, and of him alone.
It was the measure of his vast ambition and audacious will. He planned
it great enough for the capital of a Kingdom of Italy. The citizens
seconded him with generous offerings, but whether their enthusiasm was
genuine or merely flattery of the tyrant’s wishes mattered nothing. Gian
Galeazzo was doubtless moved to this work by a desire to expiate the
crime by which he had acquired sole sovereignty, and to entomb it in the
memories of his subjects beneath this proud ornament to the city. He is
said to have had another motive, shared by the people. A strange evil,
we are told, afflicted Milan at this time. Some say that the women were
unable to bring their male children safely to the birth; others, that a
mysterious malady prevailed among the boy babies, withering them within
a few years. The citizens were filled with terror at the doom of
extinction which seemed to impend over them. Gian Galeazzo’s three sons
by Isabella of France had all died in infancy, leaving him only the girl
Valentina, and at this time his second wife, Caterina Visconte, was
still childless.
The Duomo was then a votive offering from Gian Galeazzo Visconte to
Heaven for a son to inherit the great destinies which he intended to
conquer, and from the Milanese people for children to continue their
race. It was dedicated, not to the Birth of the Son of God, but to hers
who brought Him into the world—_Mariæ Nascenti_, as the inscription on
the façade proclaims—to the Birth of Motherhood.
Thus the great church rises in worship of the mystery of Life. When one
thinks of its origin, the wonderful ribbed and perforated and pinnacled
building appears in a new light, rising as it were out of the still
hovering darkness of the Middle Ages, the embodiment of a people’s
aspiration towards renewed life. The moment of its inception was that
pregnant one for Italy when the mediæval pessimism was yielding to hope
and joy in life, and when to the worship of the Nascent Mary was to be
joined the worship of that twin mystery, the Venus Reborn.
The building was begun in 1386. The story of its actual rise is
extremely lengthy and tedious. The multitude of conflicting counsels,
the number of architects concerned with it, make its very existence seem
a miracle. It is not known who first designed it, or whether he was a
native or foreigner. Milan’s close relations with the countries beyond
the Alps, and the alliances and constant intercourse of the Visconti
with the Courts of France and Germany, naturally induced Gian Galeazzo
to call Northern architects to his aid and to choose the Gothic style of
the North. There is little doubt that the original plan proceeded from a
Northern mind. The work of carrying it out, however, passed very soon
into the hands of native builders, most of whom belonged to the
celebrated guild of stoneworkers from Campione. Marco da Campione was
chief architect—ingegnere—in 1386. Others of the company, Zeno, Bonino,
Jacopo, and Maffiolo, appear in the records of the first years, with
Simone Orsenigo, the dei Grassi and a host of other noted craftsmen of
the day. Among the crowd there was evidently no conspicuous master
spirit, and the post of chief was obtained, especially later on, as much
by interest and intrigue as by merit. Many foreign artists were called
from time to time by Gian Galeazzo to give help and advice. Their
intervention always led to heated argument and loud contention in the
Council of the Fabric, the foreigners criticising and condemning the
work of the Lombard builders, and these defending it with jealous zeal,
and invariably defeating and driving out the intruders. Johann von
Fernach and Heinrich von Gmünd were employed for a short time in the
latter part of the century. Their strenuous objections to important
points in the structure were overruled by the Italians. In 1400 the
Frenchman, Jean Mignot, having been engaged to take a prominent part in
the work, pronounced the building unsafe, and proposed radical
alterations. The indignant Lombards, headed by the celebrated military
architect, Bertolino da Novara, disputed his opinion and persuaded the
Duke that all was well. Mignot was dismissed and condemned to replace
what he had already pulled down in conformity with his own ideas.
So the battle raged for years. It had a negative rather than positive
result on the building, which progressed on the lines already laid down,
but without receiving any impress of individual thought or genius. In
its complete state to-day it shows, with all its immensity, a poverty of
ideas, both within and without, which no wealth of ornamentation can
hide. It rose with great rapidity at first, in response to the energy
and will of the prince. In 1392 the walls had reached the full height of
the side aisles, and all the pillars of the interior were already
standing. That forest of lofty shafts soaring to dim heights, in which
we wander to-day, astonished and awed, must once have enclosed the puny
mortal form and the immeasurable spirit of the first and greatest Duke
of Milan. His death in 1402 robbed the great enterprise of vitality and
inspiration. In the misfortunes of Giovanmaria’s reign, both funds and
encouragement lacked, and the general mediocrity of the builders was
equally blighting to the progress of the work. The local architects had
by this time obtained undisputed charge of it, and the clamour of
controversy had died down. Sons had succeeded to their fathers’ posts,
and continued slowly in the old track. By the time Francesco Sforza
attained the Dukedom, in 1450, general interest in the Cathedral was
much diminished. Architectural ideas were changing. The Renaissance was
begun. The great Tuscan masters, summoned to Milan by this Duke and his
predecessor, had recalled to the Lombard builders those classic
principles native to Italy and long forgotten under the Gothic
influences of the Middle Ages. The earlier Sforza sovereigns used their
patronage to raise new churches, and it was not till the fervent
artistic atmosphere of the end of the century had developed a certain
eclecticism in cultured minds that the Duomo received a new impetus from
Lodovico il Moro.
The main body of the church was already finished, but the façade, the
cupola, and other details were still to do. A German master, Johann
Nexempilger von Gratz, was first invited by the Moro to continue the
work, but was quickly dismissed, the severity of his ideas being
unacceptable to the Italians. A number of native artists were then set
to work to design a cupola which should reconcile the curves and
rectangles dear to the Renaissance with the acutely-pointed style of the
rest of the Cathedral. Over this problem great minds pored. Leonardo da
Vinci made several designs and models of a cupola, but they were not
accepted. Bramante also made models for it. The assistance of the Tuscan
Luca Fancelli, and the Sienese Francesco di Giorgio was also called
upon. But the work remained finally to the local artists, men of
industry and ingenuity, but of no great genius. Chief among them were
Cristoforo Solari, Giovanni Antonio Amadeo, and Gian Giacomo Dolcebuono.
To Amadeo was finally entrusted the building of the cupola, which he
carried out and completed, with the exception of the crowning pinnacle.
This artist held the post of chief architect from 1490 till his death in
1522, becoming the repository of all the traditions and secrets of the
long-continued work.
Though the great fabric was apparently carried on in the old style, it
reveals a new spirit from this time. The true feeling for Gothic was
dead, and the architects of the late Quattrocento could only reconcile
it with their artistic conscience by flamboyant excesses. Moreover,
Amadeo and his companions were sculptors first and architects second.
The opportunities of Gothic were fatal in their hands. It was they who
first started the building on that evil course of elaborate and
excessive ornamentation which has made it what it is to-day—a building
generally admired for its resemblance to a monstrous sugar-cake. Their
lead was followed with an ever-diminishing sense of artistic propriety
and an increasing love for florid effect by their successors in the
middle and latter part of the sixteenth century. The impulse imparted to
the work by the zeal of Carlo Borromeo and the great religious revival,
expressed itself only in cold and uninspired artistic platitudes, the
emptiness of which is ill concealed by superficial exaggerations. The
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are represented by an increase of
bad taste and meretricious effect, and the story of the long evolution
of the temple ends in a climax of bombast in the Napoleonic era, to
which is owed the present grandiose façade and the battalions of
pinnacles which crown the whole edifice.
[Illustration: CUPOLA OF THE DUOMO, FROM THE ROOF.]
A building conceived in a spirit foreign to the place where it was to
rise, and carried out by men to whom its design and idea was naturally
unsympathetic and incomprehensible, through ages in which all the
original inspiration was lost, could not well be a wholly satisfactory
achievement. Milan Cathedral sins grievously against the principles of
pure Gothic. The pointed style is carried in it to an acuteness in which
all grace and flexibility of line is lost. In fretful moments one feels
that these endless sharp angles scrape one’s nerves. The effect of
solidity and strength has been completely sacrificed for the sake of
ornamentation, and dignity and repose lost in a restless reiteration of
trivial details. The huge-ribbed flanks gape with enormous windows.
Every nook and cranny, every jag and angle is crowded with statues. The
outlines of the roof are frilled by an elaborately-pierced balustrade
with crocketed pinnacles. From the central roof to the lower level of
the side aisles spring a host of flying buttresses, so perforated that
they look like wisps of foam rather than solid props intended to support
the fabric. A myriad spears quiver upwards from the roof far into the
sky, and upon each dances a statue. No wonder that the guides call upon
you to admire its likeness to lacework or confectionery, and that people
compare it to a drift of snow, a billow dashing into spray, a white
mountain bird alighted in the midst of the city—anything except a
building of solid bones and substance.
Restorations and continual repairs have almost effaced the handiwork of
the original builders. The north-east part of the exterior is the most
ancient. The three magnificent windows of the apse, with their rich
tracery, are one of the most beautiful features of the original design.
And amid the swarms of baroque saints, in every contorted attitude of
theatric sentiment, which have settled on this part, as everywhere over
the building—four thousand four hundred and forty, outside and in, they
say—a patient observer may pick out some which, by their dignified
simplicity, refinement and repose, show the purer taste of the fifteenth
and early sixteenth centuries. The lowest figures on the northernmost
window of the apse are an Adam and Eve, and have been attributed to
Antonio Rizzo, a fifteenth century Venetian sculptor, known by his work
in the cortile of the Doge’s Palace. Cristoforo Solari, Andrea Fusina,
Tomaso da Cazzaniga, il Bambaia, are all represented by sculptures on
the apse. Higher up are works by earlier and less accomplished hands,
huge gargoyles of fantastic form—dragons, a serpent coiled round the
nude body of a woman, a child entwining itself with a bough, a female
figure with great curling hair, a siren with bat’s wings—monstrous
creations of the Northern fancy, which dominated in the first years of
the Cathedral. Beneath these gargoyles are ranged the so-called Giganti,
colossal statues of warriors, heralds, huntsmen, foresters,
slaves—figures of romance and of the rude fields too. Some are by German
sculptors, and by Lombards under their influence; others of rather later
date show new and realistic tendencies.
There is little of interest on the south side and in the lower end of
the exterior. The monotonous length of the vast flanks is unbroken by
the rich interest of doorways, such as were originally projected. The
classic façade is frankly discordant, though it is no less thickly
littered with bad sculptures. The bronze doors of the middle entrance
are a very recent work, showing the hark back of the modern sculptor to
Quattrocento models. But if the exterior of the Duomo lacks in
impressiveness, the interior makes amends. Wonder and awe overwhelm one
on entering. In the dim religious light from the great stained windows,
one is aware of vast echoing aisles, of mighty columns passing away, one
behind the other, into depths and distances of rich gloom, where the
pointed lines of arch behind arch become visible, broken by long slits
of glowing glass. A quiet reigns as of places untrodden by earthly
things. Pigmy human forms creep here and there over the immense expanses
of the pavement, or kneel at the foot of a column, bowed in devotion.
In this solemn interior it seems as if the native and foreign ideals had
united for once, with harmonious result. Here is the breadth and
spaciousness of Latin thought—the loftiness of Gothic. With its five
aisles, transepts and apsidal east end, the church is of striking
simplicity. There are no chapels built out, few side altars, and few
monuments. The High Altar, with its canopy, and the florid pulpits and
marble screen round the sanctuary, are the only conspicuous objects.
There is little incident in the building itself. A feeling gains upon
one, after a time, of a certain emptiness, monotony, even poverty, in
all this grandeur of height and space. The inadequacy of the short light
arches of the nave, in comparison with the colossal shafts supporting
them becomes visible, and the eye is offended by the shameless deception
of the roof, which is painted to simulate open tracery, and give a false
effect of added height. The endless repetition of line and arch ends by
being wearisome, and one longs for the rich symmetric light and shade of
triforium and clerestory, for the beautiful mouldings, the star
blackness of trefoil and quatrefoil piercings, and for all that deep and
varied interest which grows upon the eye slowly, and in just relation to
general effect, in the best Gothic architecture. The curious and
elaborate capitals, like huge rings, are the most conspicuous details
here. Each in itself is a wonderful piece of Gothic ornament, with
arcades and crocketed pinnacles and niches filled with statues, but they
are so high up that one can hardly appreciate them in detail. As
capitals, one must quarrel with them. They do not seem natural members
of the columns, but things put on merely for effect, and look as if they
were meant to slip up and down, and might be at the bottom as well as at
the top. That on the great pier to the left of the High Altar is said to
be the handiwork of Heinrich von Gmünd, and to have been the model of
the rest. The statues which decorate the lofty interior of the cupola,
high up, are in the characteristic manner of the late fifteenth century
Lombard sculptors, and the busts of the Fathers of the Church in the
spandrils are by Cristoforo Solari. The rest of the ornamentation in the
church is mostly of the Borromean and later periods. It is the ascetic
cardinal’s fault that all the picturesque incrustations which had
gathered upon the old building, with priceless historic associations,
are missing. He ruthlessly swept away the shades of the rich and lively
past, its profanities and sincerities together. The tombs of the old
Lords of Milan, Visconti and Sforza, in the ambulatory, were cleared
away, and other monuments were destroyed or displaced in too zealous
obedience to the decree of the Council of Trent, forbidding the burial
of bodies in monuments in churches. The doors in the transepts were
walled up, and his favourite sculptor, Pellegrino Tebaldi, a belated
follower of Michaelangelo, whose neo-classic predilections were in utter
disaccord with the spirit of the building, was set to work to re-garnish
its devastated spaces.
[Illustration: WITHIN THE DUOMO.]
There are no paintings of account in the church. The few pictures belong
to the same period as the altars, designed by il Pellegrini, over which
they hang. The original Gothic design did not admit of frescoes on the
walls. The necessary colour is given by the windows. In many of these
the glass is modern, but some very fine fifteenth and sixteenth century
glass still survives. It has not the supreme beauty of very early glass;
the designs are pictorial, but the colour is gorgeously rich and deep,
and in the earlier ones the subjects are treated with due regard for
decorative effect.
A few things of interest may indeed be found in the vast spaces of the
nave and ambulatory. Low down against the north wall is the rude granite
tomb of Archbishop Ariberto, eleventh century, brought hither in 1783
from the suppressed Church of St. Dionysius. The ancient crucifix of
Byzantine style above it, upon the foot of which is a relief of Ariberto
holding a model of St. Calimero, a church restored by him, is said, but
without foundation, to be the crucifix which used to be carried into
battle on the Caroccio. Beneath a window further up stands a
sarcophagus, raised upon columns of Verona marble; in it are the bones
of the two Visconte Archbishops, Otto, Lord of Milan in the thirteenth
century, and his great grand-nephew Giovanni, who ruled See and city in
the first half of the fourteenth, and who elected to be laid with his
great predecessor when he died. The recumbent statue of Giovanni on the
top is probably by a Campionese master. This monument, which had once an
honourable place in the apse, is the only memorial in the church of the
great family which founded it. Higher up is the Gothic tomb of Marco
Caselli, a merchant who died in 1394, and gave his large fortune to the
building of the Cathedral. The tomb was designed by Filippino da Modena,
but the recumbent statue and the figures of Evangelists and Fathers on
the front and sides are by another hand, a Venetian or a Lombard
influenced by the Venetian school.[4] We come next to a refined little
sixteenth century monument to Giovanni Antonio Vimercati, by Agostino
Busti, il Bambaia. Three altars designed by il Pellegrini follow. Over
the last there is a bas-relief of Madonna with SS. Catherine and Paul, a
poor and primitive work by one Jacomolo di Antonio (1495), recently
placed here.
Footnote 4:
Malaguzzi Valeri, _Milano_, vol. i. p. 73.
In the south transept the beautiful window over the door into the street
is mainly the work, much mutilated and added to, of Michelino da Besozzo
in 1438. Here on the west side is a great monument by Leone Leoni of
Arezzo, a disciple of Michaelangelo, to Gian Giacomo de’ Medici, brother
of Pius IV., a princely pirate who terrorised Lake Como and led his
undisciplined troops in the service now of one, now of the other of the
combatants struggling for North Italy in the sixteenth century, till
Charles V. compounded with him by creating him Marquis of Melegnano. On
the east side is an altar with a relief of the Presentation of the
Virgin, and statues by the school of il Bambaia. A statue close by
representing St. Bartholomew flayed is admirable only for the impudence
of the inscription on it—‘_Non me Praxitiles, sed Marcus finxit
Agrates._’ Marco Agrate was one of the crowd of early sixteenth century
Lombard sculptors who helped to people the Duomo with statues. This one
was originally on the exterior of the church.
The choir in its present form is due to Pellegrini, whose assistants
executed the grandiose work after his designs. It is enclosed by a high
marble screen, which is sculptured on the side towards the ambulatory
with reliefs of the life of the Virgin and decorative figures of late
Renaissance style. Two extremely ornate gilded pulpits stand in front of
the choir, one on each side. The organs are embellished with heavy
gilded decoration and paintings by Proccacini and the late Lombard
school. The choir has very fine decorative panelling, and the triple row
of stalls are of walnut wood very richly carved, those behind showing
scenes from the story of St. Ambrose and effigies of the martyrs and
saints and prelates of Milan. The bronze ciborium over the altar is a
good work of its period; it is in the form of a round temple, and
beneath is the richly-ornamented tabernacle given by the Milanese Pope,
Pius IV. (1559-65), to the Cathedral.
Beneath the choir is the crypt, also built in classic style by il
Pellegrini. The outer chamber was restored in 1817. In the inner
sanctuary lies the body of San Carlo in a silver coffin given by Filippo
IV. of Spain. Vault and coffin are remarkable only for gorgeousness.
Pomp and magnificence outside, an emaciated ascetic within, contrast
significant of the Church of the Catholic Revival. An aperture in front
of the choir above allows a view of the saintly resting-place.
The door into the sacristy on the south side of the ambulatory is
decorated with a rich and interesting Gothic canopy of the earliest
period of the Cathedral. This sculpture was designed and partly executed
by Hans von Fernach in 1393 and finished soon after by an Italian,
Porrino de’ Grassi, who doubtless did the graceful subject reliefs,
while the rude, vivacious little figures, from the Gospel story, in the
decorative border round, are evidently by a hand of different
nationality, that of the German Hans. Within the sacristy there is a
richly-sculptured Gothic arch over the lavabo, enshrining a relief of
Christ and the Samaritan Woman, signed by the sculptor, Giacomo da
Campione.[5] Also a statue of Christ at the Column, by Cristoforo
Solari, a heavy and flaccid work.
Footnote 5:
See Malaguzzi Valeri, op. cit. vol. i. p. 56.
The famous treasure of the Cathedral is kept in this sacristy. Here are
great seicento figures of St. Ambrogio and S. Carlo in solid silver, and
other silver objects of the same period, precious in material but
artistically of little account. In a small case there are, however, some
veritable treasures. The covers of a Book of the Gospels, presented to
the Cathedral by Ariberto, beautiful examples of the goldsmith’s art in
the Romanesque period, adorned with chiselled reliefs, with enamel, gold
filigree work and precious stones. On one is represented Christ between
the Virgin and St. John, with Ariberto presenting the book to her, and
below, St. Ambrogio between SS. Protasio and Gervasio. The work shows
the Byzantine influence, which was still supreme in this branch of art
in the eleventh century. A pastoral staff of silver gilt, ornamented
with enamel, is of the same period. Two ivory diptychs, one of very
early date, carved with the freedom and grace still surviving in Greek
artists in the fourth and fifth centuries; the other of heavy and
debased Lombard workmanship of the ninth century must be noticed, and
also a little ivory vessel carved with figures of the Virgin and
Evangelists, tenth century Lombard work. Among many precious mediæval
and Renaissance objects there is a golden pax, with a finely carved
Deposition between columns of lapis-lazuli, and a group of angels above,
with the arms of the donor, Pius IV. This is attributed, but
erroneously, to Caradosso.
The magnificent tapestries in the possession of the Cathedral were shown
at the Great Exhibition of 1906, and several of them perished in the
fire which occurred on that occasion.
Beyond the sacristy, in the ambulatory, is a copy of the sacred painting
of the Annunciation, in the SS. Annunziata in Florence. It is said to
have been painted by Bronzino, and given by Francesco I. de’ Medici to
Cardinal Borromeo. The Madonna del Parto further on is apparently a
restoration of an ancient painting, and the object of a very special
devotion. A bare inscription beneath it records that Niccolò Piccinino
is buried with his son Francesco in this spot. The great Condottiere had
prepared a splendid tomb for himself, but the marble was seized at his
death for other purposes, and when Francesco Sforza became Duke, he
preferred that the memory of his rival should go uncelebrated. The
statue of Martin V. close by, a colossal seated figure, was sculptured
by Jacopino da Tradate in 1421. In the long inscription in verse, by a
Milanese gentleman of humanistic tastes, the sculptor is likened to
Praxiteles. Beyond we come to the monument of Cardinal Marino
Caraccioli, Governor of Milan from 1536 to 1538—a late and very
uninspired work by il Bambaia. Close to it is a little Pietà, by one of
the early Cathedral sculptors. The three great windows of the apse were
originally filled with stained glass, by Stefano da Pandino and
Franceschino de’ Zavatarii, early in the fifteenth century, but only in
the upper part of the middle window does any of it survive; the rest is
modern. In the sculptured tracery of the middle window appear the
favourite emblem of Gian Galeazzo Visconte, the Dove in the midst of
rays, and figures, sculptured after the design of Isacco da Imbonate, of
the Virgin and the Angel of the Annunciation, and of the two bishop
saints, Ambrogio and Galdino. The latter was Archbishop of Milan from
1166 to 1176, and a notable foe of heretics and Ghibellines.
Under the window further on is an ancient Crucifix, with head restored,
brought here from the chapel of Filippo Maria’s castle when it was
demolished by the Ambrosian Republic. Tablets under the great windows
record members of the Sforza family buried here. It was in the apse that
the biers of the Dukes of Milan used to be suspended, between the
columns, till San Carlo reformed them away. The body of Gaston de Foix
was given royal place among them, being hung between the two great
pillars on the left hand of the altar. Cardinal Borromeo did not have
the displacing of that, however. He was anticipated by the Swiss
mercenaries under the brutal Cardinal de Sion, who, only a few years
after the hero was buried, tore down the bier and scattered the remains,
to the scandal of all Christendom. A fresco further on in the
ambulatory, of the Crucified, with Saints, a poor work with a certain
charm of simplicity and prettiness, by Isacco da Imbonate, in 1423,
seems to show an intention, quickly abandoned, of clothing the walls
with paintings. Beyond we come to a fifteenth century painting of
Madonna, and St. John the Baptist, standing in a flowery landscape,
showing little merit except decorative charm. High up against the wall
is a statue of Pius IV., by the sixteenth century sculptor, Angelo
Siciliano.
The Gothic ornamentation over the door of the north sacristy takes us
back to early days again. It is by Giacomo da Campione.[6] The canopy
encloses a relief of Christ in Glory, surrounded by angels and saints,
and in the tympanum below, Christ appears between the Virgin and St.
John. These sculptures are more accomplished than those of the south
sacristy, though they show the Lombard lack of idealism; the small
profile busts of men in the costume of the period on the
architrave—perhaps portraits of the artist’s fellow-workmen on the
Cathedral—are excellent, well-modelled, and full of vivacity.
Footnote 6:
See Malaguzzi Valeri, op. cit., vol. i. p. 56.
In the north transept stands the _Albero_, a colossal seven-branched
candlestick of bronze, in the form of a tree. An inscription on the base
records that it was presented to the Cathedral by one of the Trivulzio
family in 1562, but it is usually described as thirteenth century work.
The style, however, proclaims it not earlier than the late fifteenth,
and it might well be later. The seven branches spring from a bossy stem
supported on winged dragons; the interstices are filled up with a web of
vine tendrils in which figures of delicate workmanship are
wrought—sacred and symbolic characters, and biblical scenes; the story
of Adam and Eve, Noah and the Dove, the Sacrifice of Isaac, David with
the head of Goliath, etc. The Procession and Adoration of the Magi are
cunningly arranged round the stem. Up the sides of the chapel of the
Madonna dell’ Albero there are some bas-reliefs representing the Life of
the Virgin, by Cristoforo Solari, il Bambaia and others of the early
Cinquecentists; these were originally round the door in this transept
which Cardinal Borromeo abolished. The stained glass window over the
altar of St. Catherine in the corner of the transept to the left is by
Stefano da Pandino (1432). The altar has statues of St. Jerome and St.
Augustine, early works of Cristoforo Solari, and some little sculptures
of earlier date, doubtless from some older shrine. The tabernacle on the
right, with a figure of God the Father, is by one of the Campionesi.
On the third altar in the nave on this side is preserved the wooden
crucifix carried by S. Carlo in procession round the city during the
Great Plague of 1576.
A little altar further on, with modern sculptures, is decorated with
beautiful Quattrocento arabesques, fragments of a monument sculptured by
Amadeo in 1480 for Alessio Tarchetta, a general of the Sforza. Other
parts of the monument are preserved in the Castello. Beyond is the tomb
of Gio. Angelo Arcimboldi, Archbishop of Milan from 1550 to 1555. Lower
down we see some twelfth and thirteenth century figures representing the
writers of the New Testament, in Verona marble, probably parts of an
ambone or pulpit, and perhaps some of the figures of saints with which
Archbishop Uberto Crivelli, afterwards Urban III., is recorded to have
decorated the old Sta. Maria Maggiore in 1185.
The Baptistery is on this side of the nave, between two of the pillars.
The font is an ancient basin of red porphyry, said to have once been in
the Baths of Maximian Hercules; it was found in S. Dionysius, with the
remains of that saintly prelate of Milan inside. These were translated
to a place in front of the High Altar. The canopy over the font is an
ornate late Renaissance work designed by il Pellegrini.
Down here in the nave, where the later ornamental details are lost in
the great pillared spaces, it is possible to call back some of the
shades frightened away by the purifying S. Carlo. Wicked they were
indeed, but in a great way which it is not given to modern sinners to
emulate. First of all we see Gian Galeazzo, the founder of the temple—he
who all but mounted to a throne of Italy on the body of his murdered
uncle—passing calm, cultured and impenetrable, between the columns. Then
the bleeding body of his evil son Giovanmaria, carried from the steps of
the palace where he had fallen and flung down here in haste by the
terrified bearers. The cunning and suspicious Filippo next—who but a few
weeks before had beheaded his wife—following Pope Martin in the great
pageant of the consecration of the High Altar in 1418, uneasy at finding
himself under the eyes of his subjects. Francesco Sforza, the splendid
conqueror, pressing his way up the great nave on his war-horse, amid the
thronging multitudes, to give thanks to God that Milan was delivered
into his hands. His weak young grandson, Gian Galeazzo, hand in hand
with his youthful bride, Isabella of Aragon, a white-robed pathetic
pair, passing up to the celebration of their marriage, beneath a
specially constructed portico, simulating a pergola and supported on
fifty-two columns. The usurper Lodovico il Moro, with the ducal beretta
newly set upon his head at the door of the Cathedral, moving with
majestic step towards the High Altar, to seek the benediction of Heaven
upon his unlawful dignities. We see the latter again a few years later,
during that brief return in 1500, bowed with care and apprehension,
giving hasty thanks to God for restoring the city to him, while the
French guns, thundering from the Castle, tell him what a mockery that
restoration is. A moment later his tragic figure has vanished into the
shades and the aisles echo to the triumphant tread of the French
conqueror and his captains, Trivulzio and the rest, and the subservient
Italian princes and ambassadors, coming to give thanks in their turn.
And now the stately figures of foreign kings and emperors succeed one
another in the many gorgeous processions which pass up between the
columns. Thrust between them is the mournful Triumph of the young French
hero, whose dead body, with the sword of Julius II., and the standards
of the Spanish King and of all the great captains whom he had overthrown
in his last victory displayed before it, is carried up in silence and
tears. Anon the place fills with the pitiful multitudes during the
dreadful days of French and Spanish occupation; now they gather round
the frenzied _frate barbazza_, who shrieks to them to rise and slaughter
their persecutors, now marshal themselves in penitential procession,
beating their breasts and wailing _misericordia_. And as the figure of
the reforming Cardinal Archbishop—the ascetic and despotic saint—rises
before us, the great nave clears suddenly of all that clamorous life of
the city which did not fear before to pass in and out on its daily
affairs and to bring its worldly traffickings, its quarrels, troubles,
excitements, sorrows, into the House of God,—and we lose sight for ever
of the mediæval world.
The roof of the Duomo is ascended from the south transept. It is a long
climb, but well worth the pains. You emerge at the top into sunshine and
air, and find yourself on the terrace of a vast garden, all of sparkling
candid stone, where you may wander, easily losing yourself, along paths
and alleys, up and down flights of steps, always between marble groves
of flowers and foliage, with a forest of slender stems springing up
around you, and flowering into human forms high up against the blue—all
the petrified growth of that lake grotto of Gandoglia, or _Candoglia_,
as the punning old writers call it. There is no open space in the heart
of Milan where you can take the air so pleasantly on fine days in winter
and spring as up here. But this garden is suspended in the air, and you
look down upon the thick clustered roofs which cover all the ground
below in an immense roundure, like the low ruddy vegetation of an island
left bare at low tide in the middle of a purple sea. Immediately
beneath, at dizzy depths, are the narrow intersecting lines of the
streets, full of black, crawling humanity. From up here you see the city
as a whole, and are able to realise something of its geographic place.
If the day is clear there will appear, rising up on north and west
beyond the sea of plain, the dim shores of what looks like another
world—a vast half-moon of hovering forms, cloud-like, yet with the
clear-cut contours of earthly substances, rising out of the shadow of
earth to shining whiteness against the sky. The guidebooks give names to
these fairy shapes—Mont Blanc to the west, Monta Rosa nearer and more
conspicuous, the Matterhorn rising close behind this last, and other
famous heights. Unless the weather is exceptionally favourable, however,
one cannot discern with clearness more than the nearer spurs of the
mighty Alpine barrier which defends the pleasant land of Italy from the
cold and gloomy North. But it is enough to make one understand the
significance of Milan in the historic past, as guardian of the chief
gateways of Italy.
[Illustration: PUTTI, GUGLIA DI AMADEO.]
The Cathedral itself is a wonderful vision from the top, with its vistas
of flying buttresses and crocketed pinnacles, and all its immensity of
intricate stone-work. The colour of the marble, and the play of light
and shade upon the fretted surfaces give it a peculiar enchantment.
Looked at closely, however, it all becomes rather frivolous and
wearisome. Nothing could be more monotonous than the uninventive
likeness in difference of the endless ornamentation. No one detail is
the same as another, yet the lines are all alike, for ever and ever
repeated. The actual work is mostly modern. The most conspicuous and
interesting feature is, of course, the great octagonal cupola, the main
part of which was built in the early years of the sixteenth century by
Amadeo. He was prevented, however, by the continual objections and
disputes of the experts whose advice was called in about it, from
finishing the work, and the ornate construction of rampant arches and
pinnacles and central spire which surmounts it belongs to the eighteenth
century. Of the four spiral turrets at the corners, with staircases in
them, three were not built till the last century, but the one on the
north-east was designed by Amadeo himself, who perhaps set his own hand
to some of the excessively flamboyant ornamentation. It is called the
_Guglia di Amadeo_, but the upper part was rebuilt in 1799. The loggetta
connecting it with the body of the structure is encrusted with charming
reliefs, but though the delightful medley of putti, and angels dancing
and playing instruments of music round the medallions of Madonna on one
side, and the Pietà on the other, have much of the gaiety and abandon of
Amadeo’s work, their execution is too weak for him. The attractive
infants, swinging and playing in the openings of the stone-work on
either side of the passage lower down are more like his handiwork, and
the New Testament scenes carved in low relief at the base are probably
by a late follower of the master.[7] At the top of the staircase in this
_Guglia_, now kept locked, in the little passage in the loggetta, there
is a medallion portrait in bas-relief, by an unknown hand, of Amadeo
himself, showing the deep-lined bony profile of an old man, with scanty
locks flowing from under his beretta.
Footnote 7:
Malaguzzi Valeri, _G. A. Amadeo_, p. 232.
[Illustration: GIANT STATUES ON THE DUOMO.]
Other details of interest are to be seen on and about the roof of the
apse. When in ascending from below you emerge into the open air, take
the passage straight before you, instead of mounting higher or turning
on to the roof of the south aisle. Passing through a covered way you
will soon come out upon a little projection of the roof, close to some
of the monstrous gargoyles, and the _Giganti_ beneath them. These last
are robust and dignified survivals of the fourteenth century, and of the
serious traditions of the Lake Masters, and are curiously at variance
with the later style of ornamentation on the building. Further on, on
the roof of the south sacristy, to which a stairway leads down, stands
the Eve of Cristoforo Solari, a graceful and expressive figure, lumpy,
however, in its contours. On the corresponding roof of the north
sacristy, on the other side of the apse, is the companion statue of
Adam, leaning in melancholy pose upon his spade, a heavy and nerveless
presentment of the father of mankind, yet most favourably distinguished
in taste from the later statues on the Cathedral. The pinnacle at the
north-east angle of this sacristy roof, surmounted by the figure of a
Knight holding a banner, is one of the oldest pieces of work on the
Cathedral. It is fourteenth century pure Gothic, and the careful and
artistic workmanship of all the rich detail of ornament on it is very
impressive in comparison with its surroundings.
From the roof of the Cathedral one has an unobstructed view of the tall
octagonal Campanile of San Gottardo to the south. This beautiful and
characteristic North Italian building of the fourteenth century combines
the beauties of Lombard and Gothic with incomparably harmonious effect,
achieving a wonderful charm of colour and grace by the delicate marble
arcades and slender soaring shafts of marble with which the solidity of
the ruddy brick is lightened. Unfortunately we see the brick now in the
rawness of recent restoration. The tiled steeple is surmounted by a
bronze angel in stiff pose with wings outspread. This Campanile was
built about 1330 by Magister Franciscus di Pecoraris da Cremona for Azzo
Visconte. The church beside it which that gouty prince raised in
honour—among other saints—of S. Gottardo, the protector of sufferers
from gout, and filled with precious ornaments and works of art, replaced
the old Baptistery, San Giovanni alle Fonti. It was completely
modernised in 1770, and the ancient apse—which is perhaps anterior to
the fourteenth century—is the only survival of the old building. San
Gottardo served as the chapel of the great Visconte palace, which stood
on the south of the Cathedral where now sprawl the melancholy courts and
mean buildings of the Palazzo Reale. This palace had been originally the
seat of the Milanese Consuls, and the space around it was the Broletto
Vecchio, where the public buildings stood in the early days of the
Republic. When Matteo Visconte made himself master of Milan, he and his
family, as permanent heads of the Republic, occupied the palace, and
transformed it into a fortress, with towers and moats, for the defence
of their tyranny. His grandson Azzo beautified it with ornaments and
paintings and fountains. These were all destroyed by Galeazzo II., who
rebuilt the palace on a much larger and more magnificent scale, with two
great courts surrounded by porticos, wherein took place the great
marriage feasts, and other celebrations of the splendid Visconte
Princes. There, doubtless, was set the banquet for the young Duke of
Clarence and his bride Violante, when Petrarca sat beside the
bridegroom, among the chief guests, and the boy Gian Galeazzo brought in
the marriage gifts. It was in this palace that Giovanmaria Visconte,
passing through the courts on his way to hear Mass in S. Gottardo, was
stabbed to death by the waiting conspirators. Francesco Sforza and
Lodovico il Moro repaired and embellished the palace, and it was
inhabited by Isabella of Aragon after the death of her husband Gian
Galeazzo Sforza. Restored by il Pellegrini, it was reduced to its
present aspect in 1770.
The Archiepiscopal Palace, which faces the Duomo on the south-east,
represents the dwelling-place of the ecclesiastical princes of Milan for
at least a score of centuries, and probably many more. Standing close
beside the Cathedral church, the Archbishop’s residence was called, up
to the twelfth century, the _Palazzo Milanese_, being in fact during the
earlier Middle Ages, when the archbishops ruled the city, the seat of
government, until the Palace of the Commune, or of the elected Consuls,
which rose in its precincts and under its protection, gradually usurped
its place, as the voice of the public parliament, or Arengo, held in the
Piazza, grew more and more powerful. Under the Visconte archbishops, who
once again united the ecclesiastic and temporal sovereignty in a single
hand, the palace was enlarged and partly incorporated with the palace of
the Consuls, now become, as we have seen, the fortress of the Visconti.
The Arcivescovato was rebuilt in the fifteenth century by Archbishop
Arcimboldi, and remains of that date may be seen in the outer cortile.
The great inner court is the work of il Pellegrini in S. Carlo
Borromeo’s time, and the existing building belongs partly to that period
and partly to the end of the eighteenth century.