The roof of this edifice is covered with slabs of marble. It is everywhere accessible, and is a fine place on which to ramble about undisturbed, and examine the details of the architecture; or turning our eyes to more distant objects, to survey the wide extended plain of fertile Lombardy, and the long continued ridges of the distant Alps. Even at this distance (near eighty English miles) I never contemplate the splendid summit of Monte Rosa, without a new impression of its stupendous magnificence.
The Guide de l’étranger points out many churches besides the cathedral as deserving notice, and I have made a little tour to such as appeared from the description, the most interesting; but very few presented any thing to detain me beyond the first glance. They are not in general beautiful, either on the inside or the out; but we meet with some happy effects. As antiquities, most of them have lost their interest by being modernized, particularly the inside; and this seems to have been done very much at one period, probably about the time of St. Charles Borromeo.
J. Hawksworth Sculp.
Steeple of St Gothard
London. Published by J & A. Arch. Cornhill, March 1st. 1828.
The steeple of St. Gothard, built in 1336, is a curious specimen of that age; it is of brick, except the little shafts which decorate it, and these are of stone. The four lower stories appearing above the roof of the church, are plain octagons, with unequal faces, with a row of ornamental intersecting arches to each cornice, and a shaft or bead at each angle, which interrupts all the cornices. There is a little window in the lowest but one, but it appears to have been broken through at a later period; the fourth has on each face, a window divided into two parts by a little column, and each part finishes in a small semicircular arch. This sort of arrangement occurs in the early architecture of France, of the eleventh, and perhaps of part of the twelfth century, but I think not later. In the fifth story, the angular shafts receive their capitals, and unite with other shafts on the faces of the octagon to support a series of little arches; but as the angular shafts intersect the little cornices of each story, and consequently pass beyond the upright of the plain faces, while the intermediate shafts are within that line, the latter are broken into two heights, one projecting before the other. Over this are two stories, rather smaller than those below, and forming an equal sided octagon; and above all is a spire, cut to indicate scales or shingles, terminating in a globe, and a little winged figure supporting a weathercock. I have dwelt more fully on these details, because they so strongly distinguish the Lombard buildings, from similar edifices of the same period in France or England; and because also they shew the necessity of a new system of dates, when we would determine the epoch of a building by the peculiarities of its architecture. Though built in the fourteenth century, it exhibits more of what we call Norman than of the Gothic; and perhaps the Italians never entirely abandoned that mode of building for any consistent style, till the restoration of the Roman architecture in the fifteenth century, under Brunelleschi. There are several steeples at Milan of this sort, but this is the best. It was highly extolled by contemporary writers; and it derives some additional interest from having contained the first clock which ever sounded the hours. In the earliest buildings of this kind, there are no intersections in the little ornamental arches of the several cornices: the later the edifices, the more complicated is this decoration, and in the steeple of St. Gothard, some of them are composed of four series of interwoven semicircular arches.
The Milan Guide says, that the church of the Passione is one of the handsomest in Milan; I found it very large and very ugly. Near to it is a shabby little church, I know not to whom dedicated, which struck me as giving the outline of what perhaps, ought to have been the composition of the cathedral; a large octagonal lantern at the intersection, and at the west end two towers rising considerably higher than the lantern. Under every disadvantage, the experiment proves the excellence of such an arrangement.
In all the churches of Milan, in whatever style, the arches are retained in both directions by iron bars. One would think it a point of taste with the Milanese, if that were possible, and indeed the Milan Guide does speak of it as one of the valuable inventions of modern times. A large tie-beam, generally gilt, is also seen to the arch which opens into the choir; and upon the tie-beam a crucifix, and over that a canopy of crimson silk, or velvet; nothing can be worse in point of taste, but it is curious, as exhibiting the probable origin of the rood-lofts of our own cathedrals.