CHAPTER XII.
“Launce! by mine honesty, welcome to Milan.”
Two Gentlemen of Verona, act ii. sc. 5.
Milan: the Cathedral—Sant’Ambrogio—Sant’Eustorgio—Sta. Maria delle Grazie—Certosa of Chiaravalle—Novara—Vercelli—Monza: the Cathedral—The Broletto—Sta. Maria in Strada—Como: the Broletto—The Cathedral.
MILAN is better known to the generality of English travellers than, perhaps, any other city south of the Alps; and its older portions afford a fair idea of some of the most salient points of Italian manners and customs, whilst its new and much-vaunted arcades and streets seem to be not only so cosmopolitan as to be un-Italian, but so bald and poor in design as to be repulsive wherever they are! Its narrow busy streets, though they are wanting indeed in the arcading so characteristic of very many other towns we had passed through, have that peculiar charm which life and bustle always give to strange places; the crowds of foot-passengers threading the narrow ways, with no protection from the omnibuses and carts which jostle against them, are full of animation, and lively and picturesque in their costumes. Elbowing our way between them, we soon found ourselves in a piazza, with the Duomo rising before us in all the magnificence of its white marble walls. If it be indeed true that it was designed by a German,[71] there is on the outside even more cause for astonishment at his work than if it had been the work of an Italian. The west front is quite modern, but the rest of the exterior, all in its original state, is as little German in its character as any building I have ever seen, and—shall I add it?—as little really grand as a work of art. I had just caught a glimpse of its general outline and effect by the bright moonlight, on the evening of my arrival, with the music of an Austrian band sounding pleasantly in my ears, and, thus seen, there was certainly something wild and striking in its effect. I saw the brilliantly light colour of the white marble in the full brightness of the moon, and little of the poverty of moulding, or the heaviness of traceries, or the preposterous tenuity of pinnacles, which daylight revealed, to the destruction of any belief I might still have in its beauty; and the more I examined it in detail the less satisfactory did it appear; for neither in its general mass, nor in its detail, does it bear examination. Its walls are panelled all over, the panelling having a peculiarly painful kind of pendulous, unsupported, and unconstructional character, and the string-courses are marked by a continuous trefoil arcading on their under side, which recalls the frequent Italian string-courses
in brick. The buttresses are bold in their formation and scale, but poor and weak-looking in their design, and finish at the top with pinnacles, whose thin outline, seen against the deep blue sky, is painfully bad and unsatisfying. The panelling of the walls is continued up to their whole height without any decided line of parapet or cornice, and finishes in a rough serrated line of small gables, which is particularly restless and wanting in repose. Great flying buttresses span the aisles, and then in the clerestory is repeated exactly what we have already seen below, the same panelling, the same parapet, and the same light pinnacles; the windows, however, are here very small and insignificant, whilst those in the aisles are remarkable for their large size and for the singular traceries with which they are filled. All the lower windows are transomed with a line of tracery, surmounted in each light by a crocketed canopy running up into the light above. In the apse this tracery fills the four outer lights only on each side of the two centre lights, the others being continued without interruption to the sill; and in these windows it is remarkable that each light is subdivided with a small monial below this band of tracery.
Altogether, an effect of a prodigious number and repetition of vertical lines is produced, and yet, notwithstanding this, the effect of the entire building is decidedly rather horizontal and depressing than the contrary; this is not more owing to the absence of all visible roofing than to the way in which the parapets, with their irregular gabled outline, attract the eye to a markedly horizontal feature.