Beside the door leading into the crypt, on the north side, there is a fresco, by Borgognone, of the Child Jesus among the elders in the Temple, and being found by His Mother. The sweet seriousness and devoutness of the painter are charmingly shown in this painting; the colour, warmer and gayer than he often uses, seems a forecast of his famous pupil Luini. A painting on the wall opposite of Madonna with Saints, placed so much in the dark that little can be distinguished in it except its unmistakable Lombard character, has been attributed to Zenale, but without sufficient evidence.
A chapel on the south side of the church leads to the small sanctuary which is all that remains of the Basilica Faustæ, or San Vittore in Cielo d’Oro, afterwards dedicated to S. Satiro, who was buried there in 379 by his brother St. Ambrose. The present chapel, restored in 1859, is the easternmost bay of the original church, which was probably rebuilt in the eighth century. The deep cupola is covered with gold mosaic, with a figure of San Vittore in the centre, whence the name San Vittore in Cielo d’Oro. The Evangelic Beasts are represented round the cupola, and on the walls below are stiff figures of bishops and saints of the Milanese Church. These mosaics are fifth century, but have been restored.
A chapel lower down on this side of the church is frescoed with the legend of St. George, by Lanino, a follower of Gaudenzio Ferrari. Near a side door further down still is a painting, in very bad condition, attributed to Ferrari—Christ bearing the Cross, with the Three Maries—and some late and inferior frescoes of the same school. A coloured stucco image of St. Ambrose, of the eleventh century, done from a portrait of him taken from life, as the inscription informs us, is to be seen on the wall nearer the west end. Beneath it is the stone sarcophagus of Archbishop Ansperto, and the famous epitaph referring to the building of the atrium. On the north wall, opposite, a relic of the pagan past is placed over the door leading into the belfry, a bas-relief of the Vintage, exquisitely decorative and gay. It is supposed to be a vestige of a Temple of Bacchus, which, according to tradition, stood upon the site of this church and was swept away by Ambrose. The last chapel on this side is the baptistery, and here is a fresco by Borgognone over the altar—the Risen Christ between two Angels. The long, slender figure of the Christ, graceful but nerveless, the general expression of pensiveness and sweetness, the colour no longer grey and pallid, as in his earlier pictures, but rich and harmonious, are very characteristic of this artist in his late period.
Two columns standing in the nave are surmounted, one by a serpent of bronze, the other by the cross. The serpent, if we may believe the eleventh century chronicler Landolfo, is that very one which Moses set up in the wilderness, and was brought in the writer’s own day from Constantinople by Archbishop Arnolfo, who had gone thither to seek the hand of the Emperor’s daughter for Otho III., and to whom the Greeks, who owned the sacred treasure, had presented it. Women used to bring their sick children to the column to be healed by the serpent.
In the Sacristy of the Canons may be seen some beautiful illuminated books, the most precious of which is the famous Missal of Gian Galeazzo Visconte, of the late fourteenth century, which commemorates the coronation of that prince as first Duke of Milan. It is exquisitely illuminated, in clear brilliant colour, by a Lombard miniaturist, Annovello da Imbonate. The front page depicts the scene of the coronation; a beautiful composition in which the Duke appears kneeling in crimson robe and ermine at the feet of the imperial legate, with his subjects gathered below. In the ornamental border the emblems of the Visconti are introduced; the snake, the dog chained beneath a tree, the dove with the motto, A bon droit, etc. There are other pages fully miniatured with scenes of Gian Galeazzo’s career. Among several Corali of the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century, there are two with very fine and delicate miniatures, attributed to Borgognone and suggestive of that painter in the sentiment and pose of the figures.
The Teca degli Innocenti, a silver casket of the late fifteenth century, containing relics of the Innocents, and very elaborately decorated with bas-reliefs of the Massacre, and other New Testament scenes, is kept in the sacristy, and also a silver pax, called Filippo Maria Visconte’s, with a bas-relief of the Dead Christ, of Lombard workmanship; a fifteenth century ostensory, of beautiful Gothic form, and a processional cross, given by S. Carlo to the church, but of earlier date.
A door on the north side of the church leads into the canonica, and one steps out from the grand old Lombard basilica into a beautiful portico of the Renaissance period. Lodovico il Moro intended to raise here a stately residence for the Canons. He charged Bramante of Urbino with the work, but the much occupied architect had little time to devote to it, and it dragged on, so that only this one side of the cloister, and that unfinished, was built before the Moro’s fall put an end to all his ambitious schemes. This fragment, at once so noble and so graceful in its proportions, and showing a fine and restrained taste in the capitals, is almost certainly of Bramante’s design, which is more than can be said of most of the work attributed to him in this city. The delicious putti, in every charming pose, and plastic as life itself, which decorate the labels upon the arches, show the development of Italian art in the three centuries which divide them from the grotesque sculptures in the church. How interesting, too, the contrast between the treatment of arch and pillar, of brick and stone, by the learned and sophisticated Quattrocentist, and the same forms, the same materials in the hands of the rude, vigorous, and deeply religious generation which built the church. The cloister, in its incompleteness, leaning up against the old basilica, monument of democratic fervour and strength, is a poignant relic of the aristocratic and exclusive ideas of the Renaissance, and of the incomparable grace and joyousness of their brief reign in Milan. The profiles of the two presiding spirits of that moment, Lodovico and Beatrice, are moulded on either side of the doorway by a mediocre Lombard sculptor of the Renaissance period.
A quaint chimney, upon the house facing the cloister, is an interesting example of a type once common in Milan, and still often seen in the neighbouring towns.
Adjoining the basilica is the old convent, now a military hospital, with two fine cloisters, designed, it is thought, by Bramante.
Among the lime-trees on the piazza, near the church on the north side, stands an antique column, a relic of some pagan building, either the Roman temple, which is supposed to have preceded the basilica, or of a summer palace of the emperors, which stood beside it. An ingenious thirteenth century chronicler, one Daniele, in an imaginary description of the coronation of the mediæval kings in St. Ambrogio, makes this column play an important part in the ceremony. The King must swear the oath outside the church, where a marble column stands.... He must kiss the said column, because as the column is upright, so must the judgment of the sovereign be upright. A more faithful account of the ritual at the coronations is given by the tenth century chronicler, Landolfo the Elder.