CHIMNEY, CANONICA OF ST. AMBROGIO.
CHAPTER XII
San Lorenzo. Romanesque Buildings
“Gloriose sacris micat ornata Ecclesiis
Ex quibus alma est Laurenti....”
In the Via Ticinese, just within the twelfth century boundary of the city, there stands a magnificent row of Corinthian columns, the only vestige above ground, in its original position, of the imperial Milan, whose splendours were sung by Ausonius. The Roman building of which they formed probably the peristyle, has long vanished, but the place where it must have stood is now occupied by San Lorenzo, the most ancient existing church in Milan, though much restored and altered, especially in the sixteenth century. The large impressive interior, octagonal in form, and surrounded by a wide ambulatory with a gallery above, which opens into the body of the church through four double storied arcades, recalls the style of San Vitale at Ravenna. Recent studies favour the theory that it was built in this form, as a church, in the sixth century, rather than the old idea that it was originally the great hall of Maximian’s Baths, and was converted to a Christian temple by St. Ambrose. However that may be, its form carries us back to a time which no other building in Milan commemorates, when the Roman Empire still lived, and the Church had but lately issued from its martyr struggles, and was still linked in its architecture with the old world.
San Lorenzo has unfortunately preserved none of those splendours celebrated by historian and poet in the eighth century. Arnolfo the chronicler weeps over the destruction of its roofs of mosaic and gold and starry gems, its paintings and sculptured marbles, in the calamitous fire of 1071. Oh Temple, which had not your like in the world, he cries. Restored after the fire, it was again grievously damaged by fire in 1124, and again restored. The fall of a great part of the roof in 1573 gave Cardinal Borromeo and his favourite Pellegrini an opportunity for interference. Pellegrini was succeeded in the work of restoration by his pupil, Martino Bassi. The result of their labours was the present lofty cupola, supported on great pilasters between the openings into the ambulatory, and the heavy architectural decoration of neo-classic style, which impose upon the old building, bare now of the rich and glowing colour of its original design, a cold, austere and melancholy character.
Fragments of antique capitals used upside down as bases of columns here and there, some columns of African marble in the chapel of St. Ippolito behind the High Altar, and a beautiful marble doorway with decoration of pagan character in low relief, at the entrance to the chapel of St. Aquilino, show that the church is partly composed out of the wreckage of the Roman city. The chapel last named, which opens off the ambulatory on the south, is of the sixth century, and has kept its ancient form. It is octagonal like the church, and is roofed with a shallow cupola. The circle of deep apertures high up, by which it is lighted, form outside those round-headed niches so familiar in later Lombard buildings. The Empress Galla Placidia is supposed to have founded this chapel, and to have intended to be buried there. A Christian sarcophagus, of late Roman workmanship, stands in a niche on the right hand of the entrance. But Galla Placidia lies in her gorgeous mausoleum at Ravenna. This sepulchre is said, however, to enclose the remains of her first husband, Athanulph, King of the Goths. Some mosaics in lunettes on either side of the apse date from the early days of the chapel—Christ with the Apostles, and the Shepherds feeding their Flocks. The sixteenth century tomb of St. Aquilino occupies the apse, which is decorated with frescoes of the Luinesque school.
There is little else of interest in the church. In the ambulatory is a tomb of 1411, and above it a much restored painting of Madonna with SS. Stephen and Ambrose presenting to her members of the Robbiano family, and in the chapel of St. Ippolito, a tomb with the effigy of Antonio Conte, a priest of the church, who died in 1349, and the late fifteenth century monument of another of the same family, Giovanni Conte, who restored the chapel.
The façade is of ornate late classic style, and the unfinished building on either side of the court in front was designed by Ricchini, a seventeenth century architect. An interesting view of the exterior, from the Piazza Vetra, on the north-east side, shows the enormous dome rising with incongruous effect, above the brick mass of the building, between four low towers of Lombard style, which survive from the eleventh or twelfth century reconstruction of the church after the great fires.