The Leonardesque tradition was carried on by the brothers Martino and Albertino Piazza of Lodi, whose work is suave and pleasing, but weak. The family of Campi, two generations, worked through three-quarters of the sixteenth century. Their work is able, but without distinction; they show a Venetian influence.
Bernardino Lanino was a pupil and imitator of Gaudenzio Ferrari; he was active through the middle of the sixteenth century. The school dies away with Lomazzo, more famous for his writings on Art than for his paintings, and with Daniele Crespi, in whom we see all the exaggerated realism of the decadence of Art.
CHAPTER X
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.