Milan.
Milan, the ancient capital of Lombardy, is the largest city in Italy,
except Rome; but though it is thought rather to exceed Naples in size, it
does not contain above one-half the number of inhabitants.
The cathedral stands in the centre of the city, and, after St. Peter’s,
is the most considerable building in Italy. It ought by this time to
be the largest in the world, if what they tell us be true, that it is
near four hundred years since it was begun, and that there has been a
considerable number of men daily employed in completing it ever since;
but as the injuries which time does to the ancient parts of the fabric
keep them in constant employment, without the possibility of their work
being ever completed, Martial’s epigram, on the barber Eutrapelus, has
been applied to them with great propriety. That poor man, it seems,
performed his operations so very slowly, that the beards of his patients
required shaving again on the side where he had begun, by the time he had
finished the other.
EUTRAPELUS TONSOR DUM CIRCUIT ORA LUPERCI,
EXPUNGITQUE GENAS, ALTERA BARBA SUBIT.
No church in Christendom is so much loaded, I had almost said disfigured,
with ornaments. The number of statues, withinside and without, is
prodigious; they are all of marble, and many of them finely wrought.
The greater part cannot be distinctly seen from below, and therefore
certainly have nothing to do above. Besides those which are of a size,
and in a situation to be distinguished from the street, there are great
numbers of smaller statues, like fairies peeping from every cornice, and
hid among the grotesque ornaments, which are here in vast profusion.
They must have cost much labour to the artists who formed them, and are
still a source of toil to strangers, who, in compliment to the person who
harangues on the beauties of this church, which he says is the eighth
wonder of the world, are obliged to ascend to the roof to have a nearer
view of them.
This vast fabric is not simply encrusted, which is not uncommon in Italy,
but intirely built of solid white marble, and supported by fifty columns,
said to be eighty-four feet high. The four pillars under the cupola, are
twenty-eight feet in circumference. By much the finest statue belonging
to it is that of St. Bartholomew. He appears flayed, with his skin flung
around his middle like a sash, and in the easiest and most degagé manner
imaginable. The muscles are well expressed; and the figure might be
placed with great propriety in the hall of an anatomist; but, exposed as
it is to the view of people of all professions, and of both sexes, it
excites more disgust and horror than admiration. Like those beggars who
uncover their sores in the street, the artist has destroyed the very
effect he meant to produce. This would have sufficiently evinced that the
statue was not the work of Praxitiles, without the inscription on the
pedestal.