The triumph of Francesco Sforza in 1450 began a new era of prosperity for Milanese art. A long peace, a succession of sovereigns in whom a policy of splendour was assisted by stupendous wealth and a genuine love of beauty and culture, the concourse of strangers of genius to their Court, bringing the inspiration of the great classic revival from Tuscany and Central Italy, roused the Lombards to an enthusiasm and activity which carried them to their highest pitch of achievement at the end of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Brunelleschi, employed by Filippo Maria to build a fortress, Antonio Averulino, known as Filarete, whom Francesco Sforza summoned to design the Ospedale Maggiore and to assist on the Castle, Michelozzo, builder of the beautiful Portinari Chapel, and finally the great Bramante, twelve years resident in the city in the Moro’s days, and Leonardo da Vinci himself, master of all the arts and sciences, were their guides in the new or rediscovered mysteries of architecture. Giuniforte Solari, and Pietro his son, architects of the Duomo, Certosa, and many of the churches and convents raised everywhere by Francesco and Bianca Maria in the ardour of their piety and the joy of their newly-won glory, show the transition from Gothic to the Renaissance style, slowly accomplished however, for the Lombards were tenacious of their local traditions and not ready to accept new ideas. Even in the next generation of builders, Amadeo, Dolcebuono, Cristoforo Solari, Briosco, and the rest, all nursed in the precepts imparted by the Tuscans, and fully inspired by the Renaissance spirit, there was still a lingering adhesion to certain Gothic predilections. The Lombard character, especially noticeable in a love of ornamentation, still expressed itself in the forms learnt from foreign example. In all that peculiarly graceful building in Milan of the later fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, which is called indiscriminately Bramantesque, and attributed to the influence of the Urbino master—cloisters and cortiles with elegant pillared porticos and sculptured capitals of rich and fanciful design, and archivolts and cornices decorated with terra-cotta mouldings, grand arched portals often decorated with classic heads—a Lombard character may almost always be detected.
In sculpture the Mantegazza are the first of the Milanese artists to show signs of the Renaissance. These two brothers, Cristoforo and Antonio, natives of Milan, were working from about 1443 until late in the century. They represent the old Campionese traditions revivified by contact with the new ideas, as expressed by the Paduans and Florentines. Their work is marked by that excessive zeal in the search for realism common to North Italian art at this time, leading to the representation of exaggerated action and emotion. With the Mantegazza violence is not always accompanied by strength, and their conception is not lofty enough to save their naturalistic tendency from vulgarising the sacred subjects which they set forth. The Northern element in them, encouraged by the German and Flemish artists at the liberal Sforza Court, appears in their extreme sincerity and pains, their lack of grace and idealism, their attention to minutiæ rather than to broad effect. Their figures are usually long and ill-proportioned, with small heads, the contours angular and sharp, the faces rude, with projecting cheek-bones and cavernous eyes; and the Lombard peculiarity of numberless arbitrary folds, flattened to the form beneath as if the draperies had been wetted, gives to the whole compositions of these sculptors the appearance of crumpled paper. The Mantegazza are closely followed by an artist of much more sweetness and geniality, Giovanni Antonio Amadeo (1447-1522), the most productive and typical of the new generation of sculptors. The joyous vitality of the Renaissance overflows in Amadeo and carries all his native characteristics to unrestrained excess. The Lombard love of pomp and gorgeous decoration runs to a riot of ornamentation in his reliefs, which are crowded and overloaded with rich and fertile fancies. Builder as well as sculptor, he sacrifices architectural effect without scruple for the sake of decorative detail, as the extraordinarily ornate façade of the Colleoni Chapel at Bergamo, one of his most famous works, testifies. This is a fault common to the Lombard architects. The façade of the Certosa, that museum of Renaissance art in Lombardy, the characteristic production of the busy school of the Mantegazza, Amadeo, Benedetto Briosco, and their assistants and followers, is an enduring monument of architects spoiled by being decorative sculptors, the building being treated chiefly as a space to load with decoration. The production of Amadeo’s prolific talent, during a long and prosperous career, was very large, and continued till shortly before his death. Amadeo shares the naturalistic tendency of the Mantegazza and their native mannerisms, especially that of the crumpled paper folds. A love of story-telling, amounting to loquacity, appears in his subject reliefs, with their multitudinous figures and redundant action. The florid, extravagant fancy of his decorative work is not restrained by his sense of proportion, and in his indiscriminating use of classical motives borrowed from other schools—heads of emperors, allegorical conceits, etc.—a want of culture and scholarship is evident. The vulgarity of Lombard art in comparison with the Tuscan is exemplified in Amadeo, but is redeemed by the sympathetic qualities of gaiety, spontaneity and artlessness, which give his work often much charm and sweetness.
Amadeo’s activity was at its height at the time when Leonardo was working in Milan upon the equestrian statue of Francesco Sforza. Duke Galeazzo Maria’s failure to find a native to do the work shows the limitations of the Lombard sculptors. All shunned the problem of casting a bronze figure on so large a scale. But Lodovico il Moro, taking up the interrupted project after his brother’s death, found in the Tuscan Leonardo one who feared no difficulties. The completion of the model of the horse, after years of preliminary study, was the greatest sculptural event that ever happened in Milan. But it remains outside the story of the Lombard sculptors. Unlike the painters, they seemed to have been little disturbed in their course by the tremendous personality of the Florentine. If traces of his influence appear in their work, it is in types borrowed from his paintings.
A host of well-known sculptors accompany and follow Amadeo. Gio. Dolcebuono, Cristoforo Solari, known as il Gobbo (the Hunchback), Benedetto Briosco, the Cazzaniga brothers, Agostino Busti, called il Bambaia—all show the local characteristics. But an inclination to softness and sensuousness and a lack of the old virile energy begins to vitiate their work as time goes on, and signals the coming of the decadence, though the technical skill of the school increases. Il Gobbo, scion of the old artistic stock of the Solari, was one of the most highly-reputed of the sculptors, though he has left little of high worth behind him. He was much favoured by the Moro, who chose him to execute the monument for Beatrice’s tomb. The interesting sepulchral figures of this ill-fated pair, completed many years later, and now in the Certosa, are his work. In Agostino Busti the school reaches its highest technical proficiency. But the old freshness and inspiration is gone. Il Bambaia, who is at times great—as in the beautiful recumbent figure of Gaston de Foix—degenerates often into coldness and conventionality, and his decorative taste was as ill-regulated as that of his less accomplished predecessors and contemporaries. A number of other artists—Gian Giacomo della Porta, Andrea Fusina, Cristoforo de’ Lombardi, Angelo Siciliano, and, later on, Gabrio Busca, Vincenzo Seregni, etc.—were engaged on architectural and decorative work in Milan in the sixteenth century, chiefly on the never-ending subject of the Duomo, the exterior of which is a vast object-lesson in the artistic decadence of the Milanese. The pious zeal of S. Carlo and the cultured tastes of his nephew and successor in the Archbishopric, Cardinal Federigo Borromeo, gave a new impetus to art; but it was ill-directed by the false taste of the age, and Lombard sculpture, like the architecture, ends in the empty pomposity and extravagance of the baroque style.
The other branches of mediæval and Renaissance art found a busy centre also in Milan. The decorative crafts of the goldsmith, wood-carver, of the intarsia worker and embroiderer, flourished here early. In the fourteenth century the fame of the Milanese armourers was shared by the hands which engraved the swords and shields and cuirasses forged in the clanging quarter of the Spadari. The unparalleled wealth and luxury of the Visconti and of their nobles called for the finest skill of the embroiderer and goldsmith to adorn their apparel and harness, and lavished ornamentation on their palaces, their pageants, their feasts, which shone with gold and glowed with costly and beautiful colour. In the following century all these crafts were still more encouraged by the Sforza. Matteo da Civate was a goldsmith of repute, and the Mantegazza and others of the sculptors pursued this delicate craft also with great success. The fame of the Milanese goldsmiths was finally crowned by Ambrogio Foppa, known as Caradosso, whose figures chiselled in gold were of such admirable workmanship that Cellini himself praised and envied him as one of the greatest masters in this art that he had ever known. The native workers were, however, but a few of those employed at the Sforza Court, which in the days of Lodovico and Beatrice was a very museum of artistic work of every kind, contributed by the finest talent of Italy, Germany, Flanders and Spain.
Nor was the art of painting less cherished in Milan. The Visconti, for the adornment of their great palace at Pavia, the Sforza for the splendid halls of the Castle of Milan, and of their hundred villas and palaces of pleasure, engaged an army of painters. But until the later half of the fifteenth century not one name occurs there of any significance in the history of painting. Giovanni da Milano, mentioned by Vasari as a pupil of Taddeo Gaddi, and an excellent painter, shows in his surviving works the conventional style of the later Giottesque school, varied by something of that heaviness and darkness of colour which we see afterwards in the Milanese Quattrocentists. From Giovanni onwards the few artists that we hear of, and the many that certainly worked in Milan, have left little trace behind them, and that little does not differ from the rude and homely style common in North Italy before the development of the Paduan school. Early in the fifteenth century the influence of Pisanello, who worked in the Visconti Court, and of the artistic ideals which he represents, made itself felt in Milan, and painters like Michelino da Besozzo and the Zavatarii peopled the walls of the ducal and aristocratic palaces of the Milanese state with such decorative, but strangely proportioned figures as are still to be seen in a chamber of the Palazzo Borromeo. Other and stronger influences, however, must have been working in the Milanese at this time, and under the spur of Florentine and Paduan example, and that of the German artists who thronged the court of Filippo Maria and Francesco Sforza, they were doubtless evolving obscurely the more or less distinctive character which emerges first into notice with Vincenzo Foppa. Were the works of the earlier contemporaries of Foppa, Bonifacio Bembo, Pietro dei Marchesi, Stefano de’ Fedeli, Constantino da Vaprio, Bernardino de’ Rossi, etc., still existing, we should probably find that they were already moving in the direction which his greater talent was able to pursue definitely and to point out to his successors.
Foppa’s is the first figure that stands out for real artistic excellence in the history of Milanese painting, and he is always called the founder of the school. Born at Brescia sometime in the first half of the fifteenth century, Foppa is generally supposed to have studied in the school of Squarcione. His earliest known work is the Crucifixion, at Bergamo, dated 1456. He worked chiefly in Milan and the neighbourhood, and died in 1492. He was a very serious painter, and though he had not the inspiration of genius, with sound artistic sense he grasped the material facts of nature and gave force and reality to his creations. His treatment of forms is simple and direct, and his sincerity and singleness of purpose redeem the homeliness of his types, and render his figures noble and impressive. The Squarcionesque tradition is to be seen in the classical backgrounds and inlaid marble thrones, etc., of his pictures, but the general character of his work shows a distinct departure from the Paduan style. The heavy forms and dark grey flesh tones are native qualities, and are very persistent throughout the Milanese school of painting.
Zenale, born at Treviglio in 1436, died in 1526, is little more than a name to us, for in spite of his long life scarcely any of his work has survived. The altarpiece at Treviglio, in which Buttinone was associated with him, is the only work extant that can with certainty be called his. Buttinone was his contemporary and co-worker in the frescoes in S. Pietro Gessate in Milan, as well as in the Treviglio altarpiece. Zenale’s share in these frescoes is quite unrecognisable, and there is nothing else in Milan that can be identified as his work.
Buttinone’s paintings are rare, but some survive in Milan and the neighbourhood. He has a good deal in common with Foppa, and probably derived his training from the same source; but there is a decided individuality in his work, an almost painful struggle after realism which results in a strange ugliness. His faces have great protruding foreheads and enormous ears, the flesh tones are dark and grey with streaks of high light, the children have large heads and disproportionately small limbs. There is something pathetic in his painstaking efforts and their poor results.
Ambrogio da Fossano, called Borgognone, is a much better artist. His name first appears in 1481 as a painter of the University of Milan. His early work is characterised by a simplicity and refinement and a sense of beauty which is much developed later on. He has at first the same tendency to grey flesh tones as Foppa and Buttinone, only with him they are modified to pleasant cool colour harmonizing with the silvery hues of background and draperies. Later he develops a freer expression, which we see at its best in the beautiful frescoes of S. Satiro (now in the Brera) and the Certosa. He may have felt the influence of Leonardo, but he never lost his individuality. All through his life he kept the religious feeling which is his marked characteristic, and which makes the deepest appeal of his work. His drawing, however, is often bad; his flying angels are wrongly foreshortened, and there is no movement in his figures. He did an immense amount of painting and there is a sameness in his pictures, graceful though they are.