The Story of Milan

by Ella Noyes

Though in title only regent for the young Duke, Lodovico was absolute sovereign. His extraordinary activity, resource and subtlety, backed by the boundless wealth of Milan, soon made his influence felt abroad. For the first year or two his cares at home kept him from interfering much in general affairs. The balance of power in Italy, deprived of the weight of Milan, wavered in consequence, and Sixtus IV., Naples and Venice did their utmost to swallow up Florence. The safety of the great Tuscan Republic, secured partly by the courage and address of Lorenzo de’ Medici, but more by the timely knock of the Turk at the door of Italy, at Otranto, was further assured by the fast-rising power of the new ruler of Milan, who by uniting his State in 1484, in a fresh alliance with Florence and Naples, restored to Italy that equilibrium which had been first established by his great father, Francesco.

The eleven years that followed the Peace of Bagnolo (1484-95) were the most splendid in the history of mediæval Italy. They were the culmination of a great ascent, preceding as great a downfall. Pressing upwards through the continual struggles, amid the phantoms and shadows of the earlier centuries, the chosen spirits of humanity had at last emerged upon a height, where, as in the light of unclouded morning, the whole world seemed spread out before and behind them, heaven itself within their reach, the gods themselves their fellows. In the general material prosperity out of which the fine flower of Italian civilisation in the Quattrocento had sprung, as in the cultured and artistic joy of life which was its highest expression, Milan, led by Lodovico Sforza, held a foremost place. Whatever may have been his secret motives, this prince exerted himself ceaselessly to conceive and carry out projects of enduring benefit to the country. Summoning the greatest brains in Italy to his service, he set on foot immense hydraulic works, by means of which wildernesses were converted into fruitful tracts, and new ways opened for the passage of merchandise and general traffic. He widened his father’s famous canal, the Naviglio Martesana, and the Naviglio encircling the city, employing the inventive genius of Leonardo da Vinci, to overcome the difficulty of the different levels by a system of locks, still existing in Milan to this day. He joined these canals with the ancient channel between Milan and Pavia, thus forming a navigable waterway between the Adda and the Ticino. Large districts hitherto unfertile owed their after prosperity to this enlightened ruler. He fostered agriculture, founding model farms and introducing improved breeds of cattle and horses. His pleasaunces and orchards round the Castello at Milan, and his country palaces and villas were so beautiful and fruitful that they were called earthly paradises. After a brief half century of the Sforza rule, the Duchy of Milan was become a vast garden, supporting an enormous population of hardworking peasants. Commerce flourished more than ever, every way being opened to it by wise and considerate measures. In the higher branches of industry the Moro’s vitalising interest and enthusiasm was as effective. His splendid patronage of art and letters made this city of prosperous traders the richest centre in Italy of the æsthetic culture of the Renaissance. Attracted by his liberality and large ideas, the rarest genius of the age was at his command. Bramante of Urbino spent many years at Milan, building cupolaed temples and colonnaded palaces, and transforming the old mediæval city of the Visconti into the fair Renaissance vision of the Moro’s desire. For Lodovico and for Milan, Leonardo da Vinci did his greatest works. Perugino painted for the Moro the splendid Madonna with the Archangels, now in the National Gallery, and in the stimulating atmosphere a number of native artists of considerable distinction sprang up. Lodovico equally favoured men of letters and scientific inquirers. He invited them to Milan, and gave them great rewards, and did his utmost by grants and personal care to raise the University of Pavia and the schools founded at Milan by Galeazzo to a flourishing condition.

CANAL, VIA SAN MARCO

But the merits of the Moro’s government were obscured to the people by his tyrannic methods. The peasants, groaning under the oppression of forced labour and of heavy and unjustly distributed taxation, were too preoccupied by their immediate grievances to care for the rich harvest which would ensue some day from the sacrifice of their sweat and their scanty gains. In their belief the Prince sought only self-glorification and the increase of the already fabulous ducal treasure. Their simple lamentations sound in the pages of the chroniclers like a dull threatening undertone in that wonderful symphony of rich and various instruments which the life of the Milanese Court was at this time.

CANONICA OF ST. AMBROGIO

One of the worst characteristics of a tyrant was, however, conspicuously absent in Lodovico Sforza. He was not cruel. Galeazzo’s horrible ways of enforcing the law no longer prevailed. The gallows vanished; fragments of quartered traitors adorned the gates no more, and such pains as justice or policy necessitated were administered out of the sight and, if possible, knowledge of the Moro. Even Guicciardini describes the Moro as mild and merciful. The sight of bodily suffering hurt his fastidious delicacy, his love of fair and seemly appearance, his fine sensibilities. His shrinking from blood was perhaps a sign of what may explain much that seems dark in his history—fear; of the decadence which fatally awaits races risen too swiftly to greatness. However that may be, his mildness did not win the hearts of the people for a sovereign who addressed them from behind the protection of iron bars and never admitted them to free and friendly audience. An ever-widening gulf divided their lives of elemental want and passion from the exquisite existence of subtle and various delight within the impassable walls of the Castello. It was for the Moro, we remember, that Leonardo sketched the plans of an ideal city, with an upper system of streets in which the sovereign and his chosen society of nobles and courtiers might pass, uncontaminated by the breath and odour of the multitudes below.

To the princes of the Quattrocento the people were but the necessary foundation of existence, ‘the mud on which proud man is built.’ And how incomparable was the fair fabric, so based, and composed of all the rarest elements of life. The story of the Moro’s Court is well-known to English readers. The joyous figures that peopled it are familiar to us, and the gorgeous pageants, the processions of princes and potentates and fair ladies, the stupendous display of wealth and beauty, the tourneys, feasts and dances, are tales oft told in biography and romance. In 1489 the long arranged marriage of the young Duke with Isabella of Aragon, granddaughter of King Ferrante of Naples, was celebrated with extraordinary pomp, and two years later the festivities were renewed for the double nuptials of the Regent himself with Beatrice da Este, daughter of the Duke of Ferrara, and of her brother Alfonso, heir-apparent of Ferrara, with Anna Sforza, sister of Gian Galeazzo. All these splendours were far overpassed, however, in 1493, when the Moro’s diplomacy was rewarded by an imperial alliance for the House of Sforza, and Bianca Maria, the Duke’s remaining sister, rode forth from the Castello in a chariot of gold to her marriage with the Emperor Maximilian. The imagination reels with the descriptions of the rich robes and jewels, the pavilions and triumphal arches, the garlands, the blazoned hangings, the allegorical masques, the noise of music and of applauding crowds on these occasions. One would feel that Milan must have suffered an intolerable surfeit of colour and delight, did we not know that the gorgeous riot was shaped into symmetry and order by the supreme decorative taste of the Italian Quattrocento. All the beautiful neo-pagan conceits, the new vision of the gods of Olympus granted to that age, inspired these brief spectacles. Leonardo—Bramante—fashioned those gorgeous edifices of an hour, built up that wonderful seeming, ephemeral as the glories which it celebrated, and stayed those passing moments for ever in the history of the world.

Though it was the desire to outdo every other princely Mæcenas which impelled Lodovico to bid highest for the services of great artists and scholars, it was not merely his liberality which held such a man as Leonardo at Milan, but rather his large appreciation, his sympathy with great and original ideas, his rare wisdom in leaving genius free to work in its own way. He had this, moreover, in common with that unique among the sons of the Italian Renaissance, that he, too, was a far seeker and the designer of things never to be finished. Leonardo came to Milan about 1483. There exists a copy, apparently in his own handwriting, of a letter recommending himself to the Moro, in which he enumerates all his qualifications for employment, beginning with his skill in the invention of military engines, and ending with his capacity to carry out any work in sculpture or painting as well as any other man, be he who he may. Vasari tells us that on his arrival in Milan he offered Lodovico a silver lute which he had fashioned himself in the form of a horse’s head, and in such a manner that in beauty and sonority of tone it surpassed every other instrument at the Court, and that the prince quickly became enamoured of his admirable gifts and conversation. The more intimate knowledge of the man revealed in his own notebooks has, however, changed the traditional picture of Leonardo as a fine courtier and brilliant wit and conversationalist, the centre of attraction at the Court, enjoying great revenues from the Moro and dissipating them in splendid living. We see him, instead, secluded with his pupils in the pleasant home which Lodovico gave him on the outskirts of the city, beside the Castello gardens, poring over some problem of construction or hydrostatics, striving to create a flying-machine or other novel engine. Or passing rapidly, according to his mood, from modelling the great horse to his painting in the refectory of Sta. Maria della Grazie, or tracing the exquisite contours of those beautiful favourites of the Moro, Cecilia Gallerani and her successor, Lucrezia Crivelli, mocked and allured in each shadowy face by that inscrutable smile of woman in which the secret of life seemed to hide itself. He evidently cared little to mingle with the social life of the Court, where perhaps he was neither able nor willing to express to a circle, alive to intellectual interests but enslaved by pedantry and charlatanism, those occult thoughts which even in his writings he hid in left-handed hieroglyphics. Yet he must have been a familiar presence in the palace, where he was constantly summoned for some work which to us seems strangely disproportioned to his genius—the arrangement of the water-supply for the Duchess’s bath, the designing of triumphal arches for a wedding pageant, or the costumes and accessories of some spectacular joust. Whatever it was, he did it with the interest of one for whom there is no great nor small, and for whom a moment as much as countless centuries holds eternity, and little things and big manifest alike the divine law of necessity.