SIDE AISLE OF ATRIUM, ST. AMBROGIO.

CAPITAL IN ATRIUM OF
ST. AMBROGIO.

The atrium or forecourt is surrounded on three sides by arcades supported on massive pillars. It is rather later in date than the façade of the church, which rises up in a wide gable, pierced with lofty round-headed openings above the shadow of the narthex or portico, triple-arched, which forms the eastern side of the atrium. On either hand of the church rises a campanile of characteristic Lombard type. The lower one is the Monks’ Tower, and dates from the eighth or ninth century. It is probably the first thing which the Benedictines built on entering into possession of the church in 783, bells being a necessity of the monastic ritual. The tall tower on the left, which, with its ornamental arcading and delicate ribs of brick and stone, shows an advance of some centuries on the simplicity of the older one, was built in 1128 by Archbishop Anselmo for the Canons, to vindicate the ancient rights of these, the original servants and custodians of the basilica, against the encroaching monks, who are said to have pulled down the pre-existing belfry of the secular priests. The struggles between these two bodies of secular and regular clergy, established side by side and sharing the privilege of serving the church, were very fierce and continuous through the Middle Ages. The monks are long gone now, and the Canons remain in peaceful possession of the altars and of the quiet courts and shrunken cloisters of the old place. Both towers have been restored in recent times. The atrium and façade have also been restored, but show more vestiges of the original work. In the fantastic sculptured imagery which ornaments the capitals of the great columns, in the curling foliage patterns of the friezes on archivolts and architraves, in the endless knots and intricate web of the ribbed stems upon the lintels and jambs and columns of the great middle doorway, in the grotesque beasts and human creatures which course up pillars, or writhe round capitals, we see the hand of the twelfth century craftsman still shaping the stone into the forms of religious symbolism, but expressing also his own satiric and pessimistic views of life, of nature ever at war with itself, and at the same time beginning to subordinate spiritual ideas to a desire for decorative effect. The attempts seen here at representing human figures are still of the rudest and most primitive, as for example the figure—perhaps Salome—dancing, while another plays the lyre, on a capital to the left of the middle door, the Adam and Eve (?) on either side of the Tree on one of the middle capitals of the narthex, the huntsman standing triumphant above a crowd of horned beasts—symbolic of the victory of the human over the animal nature. But many of the capitals are purely fanciful and decorative; the grotesque creatures writhe into graceful and symmetric designs, and that sort of flat-ribbed cord that appears so constantly, and in its endless windings is emblematic of eternity, is led into graceful curves and develops into leaves and stems which, growing bolder and freer, become finally beautiful foliage designs with masks and grotesques that seem to herald the Renaissance. This more advanced decoration is probably thirteenth century. Some fragments of the more archaic ornament, especially round the middle doorway, which has the appearance of being pieced together in places, seem to be survivals of an earlier existence of the church, which were embodied in the twelfth century reconstruction—the symbolic Lion of St. Mark, for example, and the Abbot’s Cross on a column on the right hand, which belongs perhaps to the period of the rebuilding for the monks. The name of Adam Magister, inscribed round a slender column on the left of the door, upside down, is no doubt that of the architect or sculptor of the present or some former phase of the building.

CAPITAL IN ATRIUM OF
ST. AMBROGIO.

The walls of the atrium and round the doorways of the church show everywhere traces of fresco paintings of various periods, from Byzantine to Giottesque and the fifteenth century Lombard school, carefully uncovered in recent times, but all hopelessly ruined. The two large half-obliterated scenes in chiaroscuro on either side, at right angles to the front wall of the church, have been attributed tentatively to the little-known painter, Zenale. They represent the story of St. Ambrose and St. Augustine. That on the right hand, which is the least spoilt, shows three devotees kneeling before St. Ambrose, who are supposed to be the three successive dukes, Francesco, Galeazzo Maria, and Gian Galeazzo Sforza. On the left of the principal door, supported on four columns, is the sarcophagus of the humanist, Pier Candido Decembrio (died 1477), secretary and biographer of Duke Filippo Maria, and of his successor, Francesco Sforza. It is a graceful Renaissance work, perhaps by the Lombard sculptor, Tommaso da Cazzaniga,[[11]] and has bas-reliefs on the front, showing the Virgin, with Decembrio kneeling before her protected by St. Ambrose, and the journey of Tobias and the Angel, signifying the soul’s journey into eternity. A very archaic bas-relief representing St. Ambrose, with the triple-thonged scourge in his hand, is on the wall beyond the left-hand door. The atrium is a museum of sculpture of many periods. Here are monuments and shields of mediæval and Renaissance days—tombstones cast out from this and neighbouring churches—the broken original of the carven beasts over the right-hand door, and various unburied fragments of that dead Roman world which underlies Milan.

[11]. See Malaguzzi Valeri, G. A. Amadeo, p. 295.

The great wooden door of the church, carved all over with small scenes, and of very ancient origin, has lost its interest by a too complete restoration. An unrestored fragment which is kept in the Archivio Capitolare has been pronounced to be of the time of Theodosius.

The interior of the basilica has the same noble effect of largeness, dignity, and repose as the atrium. In the solemn obscurity and devout silence one becomes aware of massive arches and deep vaulting, of great spaces and dim, far-off recesses, of rich colour and gilding, of grotesque forms and wreathing serpentine stems in the pallid stone of capitals and pulpit and screen. The careful restoration of half a century ago has repaired as much as possible the mishandlings which the church suffered from the zeal of Carlo Borromeo, and again two hundred years later, though the modern decoration of the cupola cannot be admired. We now see the Lombard basilica in its twelfth century form, with a great central nave of four bays, and side aisles with matronei—galleries for the women—above them, an essential feature of a Romanesque church. The nave is roofed with cross vaults springing from enormous pilasters, except the last bay before the choir, which opens up into a lofty cupola, whence a circumscribed light pours down from a circle of windows high up, illuminating the beautiful canopy of the High Altar beneath. This cupola, carried up to a height not in accord with the rest of the church, is a thirteenth century restoration, following a disastrous fall of the roof of this part in 1196.