The Palazzo de’ Giurisconsulti, in Via Mercanti, opposite the Palazzo della Ragione, was built in its present handsome but heavy form by Vincenzo Seregni in the sixteenth century, at the charge of Pope Pius IV., of the Milanese house of Medici, whose arms appear on the edifice. Till recent times this palace formed part of the old enclosure of the Broletto Nuovo.
The Palazzo Arcivescovile, of which the large cortile was built by Pellegrini, has been already mentioned in Chapter X.
The house—in Via Omenoni—built by the sculptor Leone Leoni for himself in the second half of the sixteenth century, is remarkable for the colossal statues supporting the cornice, whence it has acquired the name of Palazzo Omenoni.
Palazzo Chierici—an eighteenth century building, now a law-court—close to Sta. Maria del Carmine, should be visited for the sake of a great ceiling painting by G. B. Tiepolo, the Venetian painter. The room is open to the public.
You may get a charming glimpse of old Milan—long past the mediæval period indeed, which we set out to describe—but in a luxurious, leisured Settecento aspect almost as completely gone in these her industrial days, by walking down the Via Damiano—passing, by the way, as you turn out of Via Monforte, one of those locks in the canal which are attributed to the invention of Leonardo da Vinci—along the Naviglio, till you come to a beautiful pierced balustrade facing you across the narrow streak of water beneath a thicket of wistaria, chestnut and flowering trees. Behind appears the graceful arched portico of the palace to which the garden belongs—the Palazzo Visconti di Modrone. The wistaria has climbed all over the trees, and in spring it is a cloud of softest purple. You see the fine feathery twigs and sparse young leaves of the trees caught high up against the blue in delicate wreaths and garlands of the tender-coloured bloom, and hung with a film of its fine tendrils. A curtain of it drapes the lively green of the horse-chestnut and smothers the spikes of white blossom. The dry stem from which all this loveliness gushes forth, to fall in these cascades and streams of delicious colour, winds in great serpentine coils in the shadow over the parapet, and you may trace its stealthy and sinuous climb amid the branches of the trees—the strangling clasp of its huge vine. The central part of the parapet is guarded by two delightful stone putti, holding cornucopiæ—the genii of this joyous blossoming place. Mocked by the still flow and reflection of the water beneath, you might fancy yourself for a moment in Venice.
The flowering May-time of the year is a pleasant moment in which to see this Milan, when her squares and gardens break forth into the luxurious blossom of magnolia, chestnut and wistaria, which endear all her modern ways by their colour and sweetness, and soothe with the sight of their ever recurring, imperishable beauty, our regret for all that has perished.
CHAPTER XIV
The Brera Picture Gallery
“Chi sprezza la Pittura non ama la Filosofia ne la Natura.”—Leonardo da Vinci.
The Palazzo di Brera contains one of the finest collections of pictures in Italy. The palace itself, once the house of the great order of the Umiliati, and after them of the Jesuits, who in their turn were dispossessed by the State in 1772, is in its present form a grandiose seventeenth century building, with a double galleried cortile of fine proportions. In the midst of the cortile stands a statue of Napoleon Buonaparte, by Canova. The Biblioteca Nazionale occupies part of the building. There is a large fresco of the Marriage at Cana in Galilee on the staircase leading to the Library, by Callisto Piazza, one of the late Milanese school—a good example of the artist.
The Pinacoteca is entered from the upper loggia. The pictures have recently been admirably arranged. They are labelled with the names and dates of the artists, and the attributions are in accordance with the latest criticism. We shall only dwell on the most interesting of the numerous works, noticing particularly the local school.