Art in Milan
“Cosa bella mortal passa e non d’arte.”—Leonardo da Vinci.

The Milanese as a people do not take a great place in the story of Italian art. They show at no time the spontaneous artistic character which was the blessed birthright of the Florentines, Sienese, Umbrians, Venetians. They granted, however, splendid hospitality to the art of others. Talent of every kind was attracted to this wealthy and luxurious city, and the concourse of foreign artists roused and developed considerable industry in the natives from early times.

Lombardy, and in particular Milan, its principal city, were exposed to influences which did not reach further south. The strain of northern blood in the people, derived from their Gallic origin, readily received the impress of the ultramontanes who flowed down throughout the centuries into the fertile plains of Po and Ticino, and the thoughts and ideas which they brought, assimilating with the natural instincts of the soil, and with the ancient traditions of the Latins, resulted in an artistic character which is quite Italian, though very different from the more southern populations. It lacks their spontaneity and daring, their lofty imagination and idealism, has little of their sense of beauty, falls short in sheer ability. But it is distinguished by sincerity, a love of realism, a humble and zealous industry, and also by certain marked and inveterate mannerisms. And though the Milanese, or rather the 209Lombards who peopled the wide Duchy of the Visconti and Sforza, remained always very receptive, looking for a lead, and owing their strongest artistic impulses to some genius from abroad, their work keeps always its strong native character.

Milan’s greatest moment was one in her art, and in her public life. The same spirit of freedom which stood up to Barbarossa and Frederick II., raised her incomparable brick buildings of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In this development of architecture on the large and reasonable lines of the old Roman building, modified by the mystic ideas and melancholy sentiment of the North, and by the capabilities of the rich and plastic material yielded by the alluvial soil, Lombardy shows the highest result of the mingled elements of her artistic life. When no longer inspired by freedom, architecture was still fostered in Milan by ostentatious tyranny, and continued to be the most genial art of the people. In the fourteenth century, the Visconti raised beautiful churches and palaces, but the builders inclined more and more to abandon the national traditions for Gothic lightness and grace. In the crowning work of the Cathedral, the false Gothic ideal finally triumphed. The classical revival, which followed under the Sforza and filled the city anew with churches and palaces, was communicated to Milan by Tuscan architects. It was cherished by the eclectic spirit of princes and nobles, and owed nothing to popular impulse. But in adapting her peculiar material, brick, to the new style, Lombardy gave it a local and special character, and only when the vulgar exaggeration of the classic fashion overwhelmed Italy in a general flood of baroque extravagance, did Lombardy lose architectural individuality.

Sculpture, as the handmaid of architecture, was also actively practised in Milan from the twelfth century 210onwards. The same masters from the shores of Como, from the valley of Antelamo, close to Maggiore, from Campione near Lugano, who carried the Lombard or Romanesque style all over North Italy and into Tuscany in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, built her churches and carved upon the fa?ades mystical figures and devices. The Romanesque sculpture remaining in Milan is very rude, and the names of its authors are in few cases remembered. In the fourteenth century the family or guild of masters from Campione is prominent in the records of Milanese architecture and sculpture, and individuals are distinguished by name. Under the guidance of the Pisan sculptor Giovanni di Balduccio, one of the ablest of Nicola Pisano’s followers, who worked long in Milan, these Campionese produced numberless sepulchral monuments, a few of which survive still in the churches and museums. The Pisan traditions appear in them, modified by the native character. The classic nobility and severity, the ideal grace of Nicola and Giovanni Pisano degrade into heaviness and coarseness in these ruder and more realistic hands, and the forms learnt from them are remoulded according to certain inveterate predilections which persist always in Lombard sculpture.

At the end of this century, artistic industry received an extraordinary impulse throughout the Visconte States from the splendid patronage of Gian Galeazzo. His vast new foundations, the Duomo of Milan, the Certosa of Pavia, his mighty engineering enterprises, gave endless employment to workers in stone. In this fervour of activity Lombard sculpture began to evolve clearly its special character, and agreeably to the gorgeous tastes of the Prince, which became a tradition for his successors, a love of excessive and exaggerated ornamentation appears, and marks it henceforth.

After Gian Galeazzo a lull came in art with the 211civic confusion of Gian Maria’s few years, and the continuous wars of Filippo Maria’s thirty-five. This period represents the pause between the medi?val era and the Renaissance in Milan. The building and decoration of the Cathedral was continued slowly by men whom the old principles no longer inspired, and the new had not yet reached. No great names occur in the host of craftsmen engaged in the work. The Campione fraternity was still represented, and continued to exist for a long time, though its traditions were dying out, and Jacopino da Tradate, who worked in the earlier half of the century, was a sculptor of some power.

The triumph of Francesco Sforza in 1450 began a new era of prosperity for Milanese art. A long peace, a succession of sovereigns in whom a policy of splendour was assisted by stupendous wealth and a genuine love of beauty and culture, the concourse of strangers of genius to their Court, bringing the inspiration of the great classic revival from Tuscany and Central Italy, roused the Lombards to an enthusiasm and activity which carried them to their highest pitch of achievement at the end of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Brunelleschi, employed by Filippo Maria to build a fortress, Antonio Averulino, known as Filarete, whom Francesco Sforza summoned to design the Ospedale Maggiore and to assist on the Castle, Michelozzo, builder of the beautiful Portinari Chapel, and finally the great Bramante, twelve years resident in the city in the Moro’s days, and Leonardo da Vinci himself, master of all the arts and sciences, were their guides in the new or rediscovered mysteries of architecture. Giuniforte Solari, and Pietro his son, architects of the Duomo, Certosa, and many of the churches and convents raised everywhere by Francesco and Bianca Maria in the ardour of their piety and the 212joy of their newly-won glory, show the transition from Gothic to the Renaissance style, slowly accomplished however, for the Lombards were tenacious of their local traditions and not ready to accept new ideas. Even in the next generation of builders, Amadeo, Dolcebuono, Cristoforo Solari, Briosco, and the rest, all nursed in the precepts imparted by the Tuscans, and fully inspired by the Renaissance spirit, there was still a lingering adhesion to certain Gothic predilections. The Lombard character, especially noticeable in a love of ornamentation, still expressed itself in the forms learnt from foreign example. In all that peculiarly graceful building in Milan of the later fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, which is called indiscriminately Bramantesque, and attributed to the influence of the Urbino master—cloisters and cortiles with elegant pillared porticos and sculptured capitals of rich and fanciful design, and archivolts and cornices decorated with terra-cotta mouldings, grand arched portals often decorated with classic heads—a Lombard character may almost always be detected.

In sculpture the Mantegazza are the first of the Milanese artists to show signs of the Renaissance. These two brothers, Cristoforo and Antonio, natives of Milan, were working from about 1443 until late in the century. They represent the old Campionese traditions revivified by contact with the new ideas, as expressed by the Paduans and Florentines. Their work is marked by that excessive zeal in the search for realism common to North Italian art at this time, leading to the representation of exaggerated action and emotion. With the Mantegazza violence is not always accompanied by strength, and their conception is not lofty enough to save their naturalistic tendency from vulgarising the sacred subjects which they set forth. The Northern element in them, encouraged by the German 213and Flemish artists at the liberal Sforza Court, appears in their extreme sincerity and pains, their lack of grace and idealism, their attention to minuti? rather than to broad effect. Their figures are usually long and ill-proportioned, with small heads, the contours angular and sharp, the faces rude, with projecting cheek-bones and cavernous eyes; and the Lombard peculiarity of numberless arbitrary folds, flattened to the form beneath as if the draperies had been wetted, gives to the whole compositions of these sculptors the appearance of crumpled paper. The Mantegazza are closely followed by an artist of much more sweetness and geniality, Giovanni Antonio Amadeo (1447-1522), the most productive and typical of the new generation of sculptors. The joyous vitality of the Renaissance overflows in Amadeo and carries all his native characteristics to unrestrained excess. The Lombard love of pomp and gorgeous decoration runs to a riot of ornamentation in his reliefs, which are crowded and overloaded with rich and fertile fancies. Builder as well as sculptor, he sacrifices architectural effect without scruple for the sake of decorative detail, as the extraordinarily ornate fa?ade of the Colleoni Chapel at Bergamo, one of his most famous works, testifies. This is a fault common to the Lombard architects. The fa?ade of the Certosa, that museum of Renaissance art in Lombardy, the characteristic production of the busy school of the Mantegazza, Amadeo, Benedetto Briosco, and their assistants and followers, is an enduring monument of architects spoiled by being decorative sculptors, the building being treated chiefly as a space to load with decoration. The production of Amadeo’s prolific talent, during a long and prosperous career, was very large, and continued till shortly before his death. Amadeo shares the naturalistic tendency of the Mantegazza and their native mannerisms, especially that of the crumpled paper folds. A 214love of story-telling, amounting to loquacity, appears in his subject reliefs, with their multitudinous figures and redundant action. The florid, extravagant fancy of his decorative work is not restrained by his sense of proportion, and in his indiscriminating use of classical motives borrowed from other schools—heads of emperors, allegorical conceits, etc.—a want of culture and scholarship is evident. The vulgarity of Lombard art in comparison with the Tuscan is exemplified in Amadeo, but is redeemed by the sympathetic qualities of gaiety, spontaneity and artlessness, which give his work often much charm and sweetness.

Amadeo’s activity was at its height at the time when Leonardo was working in Milan upon the equestrian statue of Francesco Sforza. Duke Galeazzo Maria’s failure to find a native to do the work shows the limitations of the Lombard sculptors. All shunned the problem of casting a bronze figure on so large a scale. But Lodovico il Moro, taking up the interrupted project after his brother’s death, found in the Tuscan Leonardo one who feared no difficulties. The completion of the model of the horse, after years of preliminary study, was the greatest sculptural event that ever happened in Milan. But it remains outside the story of the Lombard sculptors. Unlike the painters, they seemed to have been little disturbed in their course by the tremendous personality of the Florentine. If traces of his influence appear in their work, it is in types borrowed from his paintings.

A host of well-known sculptors accompany and follow Amadeo. Gio. Dolcebuono, Cristoforo Solari, known as il Gobbo (the Hunchback), Benedetto Briosco, the Cazzaniga brothers, Agostino Busti, called il Bambaia—all show the local characteristics. But an inclination to softness and sensuousness and a lack of the old virile energy begins to vitiate their work 215as time goes on, and signals the coming of the decadence, though the technical skill of the school increases. Il Gobbo, scion of the old artistic stock of the Solari, was one of the most highly-reputed of the sculptors, though he has left little of high worth behind him. He was much favoured by the Moro, who chose him to execute the monument for Beatrice’s tomb. The interesting sepulchral figures of this ill-fated pair, completed many years later, and now in the Certosa, are his work. In Agostino Busti the school reaches its highest technical proficiency. But the old freshness and inspiration is gone. Il Bambaia, who is at times great—as in the beautiful recumbent figure of Gaston de Foix—degenerates often into coldness and conventionality, and his decorative taste was as ill-regulated as that of his less accomplished predecessors and contemporaries. A number of other artists—Gian Giacomo della Porta, Andrea Fusina, Cristoforo de’ Lombardi, Angelo Siciliano, and, later on, Gabrio Busca, Vincenzo Seregni, etc.—were engaged on architectural and decorative work in Milan in the sixteenth century, chiefly on the never-ending subject of the Duomo, the exterior of which is a vast object-lesson in the artistic decadence of the Milanese. The pious zeal of S. Carlo and the cultured tastes of his nephew and successor in the Archbishopric, Cardinal Federigo Borromeo, gave a new impetus to art; but it was ill-directed by the false taste of the age, and Lombard sculpture, like the architecture, ends in the empty pomposity and extravagance of the baroque style.

The other branches of medi?val and Renaissance art found a busy centre also in Milan. The decorative crafts of the goldsmith, wood-carver, of the intarsia worker and embroiderer, flourished here early. In the fourteenth century the fame of the Milanese armourers was shared by the hands which engraved the swords 216and shields and cuirasses forged in the clanging quarter ............