On the third altar in the nave on this side is preserved the wooden crucifix carried by S. Carlo in procession round the city during the Great Plague of 1576.
A little altar further on, with modern sculptures, is decorated with beautiful Quattrocento arabesques, fragments of a monument sculptured by Amadeo in 1480 for Alessio Tarchetta, a general of the Sforza. Other parts of the monument are preserved in the Castello. Beyond is the tomb of Gio. Angelo Arcimboldi, Archbishop of Milan from 1550 to 1555. Lower down we see some twelfth and thirteenth century figures representing the writers of the New Testament, in Verona marble, probably parts of an ambone or pulpit, and perhaps some of the figures of saints with which Archbishop Uberto Crivelli, afterwards Urban III., is recorded to have decorated the old Sta. Maria Maggiore in 1185.
The Baptistery is on this side of the nave, between two of the pillars. The font is an ancient basin of red porphyry, said to have once been in the Baths of Maximian Hercules; it was found in S. Dionysius, with the remains of that saintly prelate of Milan inside. These were translated to a place in front of the High Altar. The canopy over the font is an ornate late Renaissance work designed by il Pellegrini.
Down here in the nave, where the later ornamental details are lost in the great pillared spaces, it is possible to call back some of the shades frightened away by the purifying S. Carlo. Wicked they were indeed, but in a great way which it is not given to modern sinners to emulate. First of all we see Gian Galeazzo, the founder of the temple—he who all but mounted to a throne of Italy on the body of his murdered uncle—passing calm, cultured and impenetrable, between the columns. Then the bleeding body of his evil son Giovanmaria, carried from the steps of the palace where he had fallen and flung down here in haste by the terrified bearers. The cunning and suspicious Filippo next—who but a few weeks before had beheaded his wife—following Pope Martin in the great pageant of the consecration of the High Altar in 1418, uneasy at finding himself under the eyes of his subjects. Francesco Sforza, the splendid conqueror, pressing his way up the great nave on his war-horse, amid the thronging multitudes, to give thanks to God that Milan was delivered into his hands. His weak young grandson, Gian Galeazzo, hand in hand with his youthful bride, Isabella of Aragon, a white-robed pathetic pair, passing up to the celebration of their marriage, beneath a specially constructed portico, simulating a pergola and supported on fifty-two columns. The usurper Lodovico il Moro, with the ducal beretta newly set upon his head at the door of the Cathedral, moving with majestic step towards the High Altar, to seek the benediction of Heaven upon his unlawful dignities. We see the latter again a few years later, during that brief return in 1500, bowed with care and apprehension, giving hasty thanks to God for restoring the city to him, while the French guns, thundering from the Castle, tell him what a mockery that restoration is. A moment later his tragic figure has vanished into the shades and the aisles echo to the triumphant tread of the French conqueror and his captains, Trivulzio and the rest, and the subservient Italian princes and ambassadors, coming to give thanks in their turn. And now the stately figures of foreign kings and emperors succeed one another in the many gorgeous processions which pass up between the columns. Thrust between them is the mournful Triumph of the young French hero, whose dead body, with the sword of Julius II., and the standards of the Spanish King and of all the great captains whom he had overthrown in his last victory displayed before it, is carried up in silence and tears. Anon the place fills with the pitiful multitudes during the dreadful days of French and Spanish occupation; now they gather round the frenzied frate barbazza, who shrieks to them to rise and slaughter their persecutors, now marshal themselves in penitential procession, beating their breasts and wailing misericordia. And as the figure of the reforming Cardinal Archbishop—the ascetic and despotic saint—rises before us, the great nave clears suddenly of all that clamorous life of the city which did not fear before to pass in and out on its daily affairs and to bring its worldly traffickings, its quarrels, troubles, excitements, sorrows, into the House of God,—and we lose sight for ever of the mediæval world.
The roof of the Duomo is ascended from the south transept. It is a long climb, but well worth the pains. You emerge at the top into sunshine and air, and find yourself on the terrace of a vast garden, all of sparkling candid stone, where you may wander, easily losing yourself, along paths and alleys, up and down flights of steps, always between marble groves of flowers and foliage, with a forest of slender stems springing up around you, and flowering into human forms high up against the blue—all the petrified growth of that lake grotto of Gandoglia, or Candoglia, as the punning old writers call it. There is no open space in the heart of Milan where you can take the air so pleasantly on fine days in winter and spring as up here. But this garden is suspended in the air, and you look down upon the thick clustered roofs which cover all the ground below in an immense roundure, like the low ruddy vegetation of an island left bare at low tide in the middle of a purple sea. Immediately beneath, at dizzy depths, are the narrow intersecting lines of the streets, full of black, crawling humanity. From up here you see the city as a whole, and are able to realise something of its geographic place. If the day is clear there will appear, rising up on north and west beyond the sea of plain, the dim shores of what looks like another world—a vast half-moon of hovering forms, cloud-like, yet with the clear-cut contours of earthly substances, rising out of the shadow of earth to shining whiteness against the sky. The guidebooks give names to these fairy shapes—Mont Blanc to the west, Monta Rosa nearer and more conspicuous, the Matterhorn rising close behind this last, and other famous heights. Unless the weather is exceptionally favourable, however, one cannot discern with clearness more than the nearer spurs of the mighty Alpine barrier which defends the pleasant land of Italy from the cold and gloomy North. But it is enough to make one understand the significance of Milan in the historic past, as guardian of the chief gateways of Italy.
PUTTI, GUGLIA DI AMADEO.
The Cathedral itself is a wonderful vision from the top, with its vistas of flying buttresses and crocketed pinnacles, and all its immensity of intricate stone-work. The colour of the marble, and the play of light and shade upon the fretted surfaces give it a peculiar enchantment. Looked at closely, however, it all becomes rather frivolous and wearisome. Nothing could be more monotonous than the uninventive likeness in difference of the endless ornamentation. No one detail is the same as another, yet the lines are all alike, for ever and ever repeated. The actual work is mostly modern. The most conspicuous and interesting feature is, of course, the great octagonal cupola, the main part of which was built in the early years of the sixteenth century by Amadeo. He was prevented, however, by the continual objections and disputes of the experts whose advice was called in about it, from finishing the work, and the ornate construction of rampant arches and pinnacles and central spire which surmounts it belongs to the eighteenth century. Of the four spiral turrets at the corners, with staircases in them, three were not built till the last century, but the one on the north-east was designed by Amadeo himself, who perhaps set his own hand to some of the excessively flamboyant ornamentation. It is called the Guglia di Amadeo, but the upper part was rebuilt in 1799. The loggetta connecting it with the body of the structure is encrusted with charming reliefs, but though the delightful medley of putti, and angels dancing and playing instruments of music round the medallions of Madonna on one side, and the Pietà on the other, have much of the gaiety and abandon of Amadeo’s work, their execution is too weak for him. The attractive infants, swinging and playing in the openings of the stone-work on either side of the passage lower down are more like his handiwork, and the New Testament scenes carved in low relief at the base are probably by a late follower of the master.[[7]] At the top of the staircase in this Guglia, now kept locked, in the little passage in the loggetta, there is a medallion portrait in bas-relief, by an unknown hand, of Amadeo himself, showing the deep-lined bony profile of an old man, with scanty locks flowing from under his beretta.
[7]. Malaguzzi Valeri, G. A. Amadeo, p. 232.
