LAST SUPPER, BY LEONARDO. DETAIL, ST. JOHN, ST. PETER AND JUDAS
To face p. [316]] [A. Ferrario, Milan
The great work in the Dominican convent attracted immense attention and interest even during its progress. It is often mentioned by writers of this time and a little later. Bandello, in one of his novels, gives an oft-quoted description of the painter at work. He used often to go early in the morning and mount upon the platform and, from sunrise until the dusk of evening, never putting down his brush and forgetting to eat and drink, paint without ceasing. Then two, three or four days would pass when he would not touch it, but remained for one or two hours together contemplating, considering and examining within himself, judging his figures. I have seen him too, according as his caprice or humour moved him, go off at noon-day, when the sun was in Leo, from the Corte Vecchia, where he was composing his stupendous horse of clay, and come straight to the Grazie, and mounting the platform, take a brush and give one or two strokes to one of the figures, and straightway depart and go elsewhere. Doubtless Bandello was often in that room, where the friars watched the progress of the painting with great impatience, annoyed at the painter’s unaccountable lengthiness. Duke Lodovico himself, finest and most appreciative of critics, would sometimes come, and many noble gentlemen were wont to visit the painter here and converse with him as they contemplated his work. The fame of the great picture spread quickly throughout Europe. When Louis XII. entered Milan in 1499, he came to see it, and expressed a desire, fortunately impracticable, to carry it away to his own country. With him were Duke Ercole of Ferrara, the Marquis Gian Francesco of Mantua, and many other brilliant and historic characters; among them was Cæsar Borgia, and possibly it was on this occasion, before his newly finished picture, that Leonardo first met this extraordinary man, into whose service he shortly after entered.
The other end of the refectory is filled with a vast fresco of the Crucifixion, by Montorfano, signed with his name and the date 1495. The perfect state of preservation of this poor, laboured and crowded composition, an inferior example even of the Milanese school, seems a bitter irony here. The Lombard painter, sticking to the old groove, has achieved the permanence which Leonardo recklessly risked for the sake of an experiment. At the lower corner of the painting, on either side, are portraits of the ducal family kneeling in devotion, Lodovico and the little Maximilian on the left, Beatrice and the younger child Francesco on the right, and these, unlike the rest of the picture, are in very bad condition—almost obliterated. Vasari affirms them to have been painted by Leonardo himself at the special command of the Duke, and in oil, like the Last Supper; but the portraits themselves, as far as can be judged from what remains of them, are quite mediocre and do not bear out his statement.
In San Satiro, entered from Via Torino, we come at last to a building really by Bramante. The church is properly called Sta. Maria, the ancient S. Satiro being represented by a chapel incorporated with it. It was founded in 1476, on the site of a shrine containing a miraculous picture of the Virgin. It is a purely Renaissance building, but has certain peculiarities due to cramped conditions, the builder having been restricted in space and bound by the necessity of embodying the remains of the old Basilica of S. Satiro on one side and of an existing Chapel of S. Teodoro on the other. The difficulties have been ingeniously surmounted, and the effect is very fine, but it seems a pity that the genius of Bramante should not have had room for free play. The general impression on entering into the rich and gilded obscurity of the interior is of great breadth and spaciousness. The three aisles, in which the dividing pilasters and arches are unusually low in proportion to the height of the roof—a feature explained by the necessity of according them with the old S. Satiro, now the Chapel of the Pietà—open out into a great space roofed by a lofty cupola and with wide transepts. The church ends in a grandiose semicircular choir. Here the architect met with his chief difficulty, being prevented by the street outside from carrying the building as far eastward as was necessary for his design after allowing full scope for the rise of the cupola. He has overcome it by a deceptive use of perspective, the depth of the choir being simulated, not real. The device can only be admired for its ingenuity and the cleverness with which it is executed.
The gilded friezes and capitals of the nave are of the best Renaissance style, rich but of clear and not over-elaborate design. In the spandrils beneath the cupola are medallions circled with gilded ornamentation and containing paintings of the four Evangelists, by Bramantino, dignified forms, dim and rich in colour as seen from below. There is an old picture of the Virgin over the High Altar, with a portrait in it of the young Duke Gian Galeazzo Sforza, but it is held in such extreme veneration that the veil covering it may not be withdrawn except on one special day of the year.
The Chapel of the Pietà is at the end of the left transept. This ninth century structure, founded according to tradition by Archbishop Ansperto, was restored at the time when the large church was built beside it. The coloured terra-cotta group of the Deposition which gives its present name to the chapel, a crudely realistic work, ably modelled and utterly inartistic, has been ascribed, quite unjustifiably, to the famous Milanese goldsmith, Caradosso, a delicate worker in fine materials. It is probably by one of the many Lombard sculptors of the style of the Mantegazza.
Adjoining the church on the right is the Baptistery or sacristy, a beautiful little example of Bramante’s work. It is a small octagonal building with a lofty dome and very richly decorated. The remarkable terra-cotta frieze, composed of heads projecting from wreaths, between groups of sportive putti, and painted to look like bronze, has been also always ascribed to Caradosso; but it is now pronounced to be certainly not his work, the style of the heads, vigorous, realistic, and somewhat coarse, showing all the characteristics of the late fifteenth century Lombard school of sculpture, rather than the fine hand of the metal-worker, trained in Rome, whom documents, moreover, prove to have been absent from Milan when this work was executed.
The exterior of the church is much hidden by the houses around, but a bit of it can be seen closely in Via Falcone and shows Bramante’s hand in the bold classic style, and the strong, simple, and graceful design of the terra-cotta ornamentation. From the Via Carlo Alberto one gets an impressive view of part of the low and elaborate Renaissance pile, proud and learned, and beautiful with brick and stucco decoration, swelling beside the simple old Campanile which belongs to the original ninth century church, and is the most ancient example of a Romanesque tower now existing in Milan.
