The Story of Milan

by Ella Noyes

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.

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.