The Duomo
“The far-famed Cathedral of Milan, which men call the eighth wonder of the world.”

In Milan, as we see the city to-day, modernised, commonplace, characterlessly handsome, there is one great redeeming thing—the Cathedral. Other churches there are, greater and more beautiful in every sense except size, but they are smothered in the dull drift of everyday buildings. The Duomo, as is befitting, has a supreme position. It is the heart of the city, the converging point of all the far-coming ways, the irresistible magnet for the eyes of the myriads thronging those ways. It rises up in its immense stature above the petty interests and activities of the crowds at its base, an embodied exhalation of the holy spirit of man, a witness to the irrepressible upward flight of his thoughts and to his eternal need of beauty and light.

The impression which a traveller coming from the station first receives of the Duomo is of a vast ethereal presence at the end of the long street, so light, so cloud-like, so delicate that it seems to be no temple piled up slowly by men’s hands to the measure of their prayers, but a fabric of some upper sphere, built of air and dreams. Broad set in its main proportions, it gives high and ample seat to the swelling contour of the cupola, which a hundred pinnacles guard like serried spears, pointing into the upper blue around the spring of the midmost spire. In the silvery light of afternoon it appears a 225shadowy forest of upward-springing shafts, with sharp gleams along edges and salient lines. The details are lost in a soft mass, and the atmosphere casts over all a veil of illusion. Through such a veil this famous Cathedral of Milan is best seen and best understood.

In the view of the whole building from the great Piazza on the west side, its faults are more apparent—the inadequacy and insignificance of the cupola, or central tower, the incongruity of the fa?ade, the extravagance of the ornamentation. Nevertheless, the huge white marble pile has always majesty and splendour, if only from its size and material and the amazing number of its airy embroideries and fripperies of stone. It has a magic, unearthly beauty of colour, silver, dove-like, rosy against the blue, according to the changing light of the day—most wonderful in the strange, pale, clear moment when the sun has just set. An exotic in this flat country of the alluvial soil, where brick is the natural medium for the builder, it seems to bring into the hot and stifling city at midsummer a cooling breath from that marble cave close to Lago Maggiore whence its material was drawn. One could almost believe that it was the dripping of water through countless ages which had built up its clear substance into those strange fantastic shapes, those spires and fretted edges and fairy shafts.

Their Cathedral is the pride and joy of the Milanese. Yet not so much this billowy heap of stone, but the spot upon which it stands should be consecrate to their hearts. None of the noblest memories of their past sanctify the church which Gian Galeazzo Visconte founded, which opened its doors with equal welcome to Francesco Sforza, the usurper, and to French and Spanish and Austrian conquerors by turn, and which was finished by Napoleon Buonaparte. But the ancient, half-ruined church, which Gian Galeazzo pulled down to make room for his new temple, enshrined the dearer history 226of Milan’s liberty. Sta. Maria Maggiore, as it was then called, was the representative through many transformations of that basilica nuova intramuros in which Ambrose entrenched himself in his great struggle with the Empress Justina and achieved his victory for the new organisation of the Church, protector of the people, over the corrupt despotism of the Empire. And if what is one of the spiritual events of the world’s history must be fixed in time and place, it was no doubt at the gates of this, the chief church, that Ambrose interposed his hand between the blood-stained Emperor and the altar of Christ. In later centuries, in the figures of the enthusiasts Arialdo and Erlembaldo, of the courageous Peter Damian, fronting the excited and hostile multitudes, the memories of the old Cathedral church were still of the victory of the spirit over the forces of the world, of liberty over oppression, of a new order of things over the corrupt system of the past. And in the early days of the Milanese Republic the church was closely associated with the life and struggles of the people. All business, public and private, was transacted in the piazza outside. The portico of the church was the house of parliament, and the politics of the city were sanctified by the benediction of religion. The chief priest was likewise the head of the people, and the pastoral staff which topped the lofty Campanile stood for temporal as well as spiritual dominion. In times of peace the Sacred Car was housed within the church, and in the church those warlike decisions were taken which occasioned it to be drawn forth that it might go in the midst of the host against the enemy.

But the noblest moment in the story of the old Cathedral was its restoration after the ruin of the city by Barbarossa in 1166. The ruthless destruction of the Campanile, a tower of such marvellous beauty, such great breadth and admirable altitude that there was said to be 227none other like it in Italy, had wrecked it in great part. The labour of the men, the jewels of the women, went to the rebuilding, till the church stood up once more in the midst of the re-risen city, defying the destroyer.

With the building of the present Duomo all the vestiges of those ancient and good days were swept away. Milan’s liberty was gone, and the church which symbolised it, both in association and in its Lombard style of architecture, had been allowed to become half-ruinous. The population had outgrown the capacity of the church, and in their rapidly growing wealth and importance it was natural that prince and people should desire a cathedral more suited to their condition. So the old building fell for ever.

The citizens acquiesced in the scheme for a new Cathedral, but the enormous temple which rose on the site of the old one, the Duomo of to-day, was the conception of Gian Galeazzo Visconte, and of him alone. It was the measure of his vast ambition and audacious will. He planned it great enough for the capital of a Kingdom of Italy. The citizens seconded him with generous offerings, but whether their enthusiasm was genuine or merely flattery of the tyrant’s wishes mattered nothing. Gian Galeazzo was doubtless moved to this work by a desire to expiate the crime by which he had acquired sole sovereignty, and to entomb it in the memories of his subjects beneath this proud ornament to the city. He is said to have had another motive, shared by the people. A strange evil, we are told, afflicted Milan at this time. Some say that the women were unable to bring their male children safely to the birth; others, that a mysterious malady prevailed among the boy babies, withering them within a few years. The citizens were filled with terror at the doom of extinction which seemed to impend over them. Gian Galeazzo’s three sons by Isabella of France had 228all died in infancy, leaving him only the girl Valentina, and at this time his second wife, Caterina Visconte, was still childless.

The Duomo was then a votive offering from Gian Galeazzo Visconte to Heaven for a son to inherit the great destinies which he intended to conquer, and from the Milanese people for children to continue their race. It was dedicated, not to the Birth of the Son of God, but to hers who brought Him into the world—Mari? Nascenti, as the inscription on the fa?ade proclaims—to the Birth of Motherhood.

Thus the great church rises in worship of the mystery of Life. When one thinks of its origin, the wonderful ribbed and perforated and pinnacled building appears in a new light, rising as it were out of the still hovering darkness of the Middle Ages, the embodiment of a people’s aspiration towards renewed life. The moment of its inception was that pregnant one for Italy when the medi?val pessimism was yielding to hope and joy in life, and when to the worship of the Nascent Mary was to be joined the worship of that twin mystery, the Venus Reborn.

The building was begun in 1386. The story of its actual rise is extremely lengthy and tedious. The multitude of conflicting counsels, the number of architects concerned with it, make its very existence seem a miracle. It is not known who first designed it, or whether he was a native or foreigner. Milan’s close relations with the countries beyond the Alps, and the alliances and constant intercourse of the Visconti with the Courts of France and Germany, naturally induced Gian Galeazzo to call Northern architects to his aid and to choose the Gothic style of the North. There is little doubt that the original plan proceeded from a Northern mind. The work of carrying it out, however, passed very soon into the hands of native builders, 229most of whom belonged to the celebrated guild of stoneworkers from Campione. Marco da Campione was chief architect—ingegnere—in 1386. Others of the company, Zeno, Bonino, Jacopo, and Maffiolo, appear in the records of the first years, with Simone Orsenigo, the dei Grassi and a host of other noted craftsmen of the day. Among the crowd there was evidently no conspicuous master spirit, and the post of chief was obtained, especially later on, as much by interest and intrigue as by merit. Many foreign artists were called from time to time by Gian Galeazzo to give help and advice. Their intervention always led to heated argument and loud contention in the Council of the Fabric, the foreigners criticising and condemning the work of the Lombard builders, and these defending it with jealous zeal, and invariably defeating and driving out the intruders. Johann von Fernach and Heinrich von Gmünd were employed for a short time in the latter part of the century. Their strenuous objections to important points in the structure were overruled by the Italians. In 1400 the Frenchman, Jean Mignot, having been engaged to take a prominent part in the work, pronounced the building unsafe, and proposed radical alterations. The indignant Lombards, headed by the celebrated military architect, Bertolino da Novara, disputed his opinion and persuaded the Duke that all was well. Mignot was dismissed and condemned to replace what he had already pulled down in conformity with his own ideas.

So the battle raged for years. It had a negative rather than positive result on the building, which progressed on the lines already laid down, but without receiving any impress of individual thought or genius. In its complete state to-day it shows, with all its immensity, a poverty of ideas, both within and without, which no wealth of ornamentation can hide. It rose 230with great rapidity at first, in response to the energy and will of the prince. In 1392 the walls had reached the full height of the side aisles, and all the pillars of the interior were already standing. That forest of lofty shafts soaring to dim heights, in which we wander to-day, astonished and awed, must once have enclosed the puny mortal form and the immeasurable spirit of the first and greatest Duke of Milan. His death in 1402 robbed the great enterprise of vitality and inspiration. In the misfortunes of Giovanmaria’s reign, both funds and encouragement lacked, and the general mediocrity of the builders was equally blighting to the progress of the work. The local architects had by this time obtained undisputed charge of it, and the clamour of controversy had died down. Sons had succeeded to their fathers’ posts, and continued slowly in the old track. By the time Francesco Sforza attained the Dukedom, in 1450, general interest in the Cathedral was much diminished. Architectural ideas were changing. The Renaissance was begun. The great Tuscan masters, summoned to Milan by this Duke and his predecessor, had recalled to the Lombard builders those classic principles native to Italy and long forgotten under the Gothic influences of the Middle Ages. The earlier Sforza sovereigns used their patronage to raise new churches, and it was not till the fervent artistic atmosphere of the end of the century had developed a certain eclecticism in cultured minds that the Duomo received a new impetus from Lodovico il Moro.

The main body of the church was already finished, but the fa?ade, the cupola, and other details were still to do. A German master, Johann Nexempilger von Gratz, was first invited by the Moro to continue the work, but was quickly dismissed, the severity of his ideas being unacceptable to the Italians. A number of native 231artists were then set to work to design a cupola which should reconcile the curves and rectangles dear to the Renaissance with the acutely-pointed style of the rest of the Cathedral. Over this problem great minds pored. Leonardo da Vinci made several designs and models of a cupola, but they were not accepted. Bramante also made models for it. The assistance of the Tuscan Luca Fancelli, and the Sienese Francesco di Giorgio was also called upon. But the work remained finally to the local artists, men of industry and ingenuity, but of no great genius. Chief among them were Cristoforo Solari, Giovanni Antonio Amadeo, and Gian Giacomo Dolcebuono. To Amadeo was finally entrusted the building of the cupola, which he carried out and completed, with the exception of the crowning pinnacle. This artist held the post of chief architect from 1490 till his death in 1522, becoming the repository of all the traditions and secrets of the long-continued work.

Though the great fabric was apparently carried on in the old style, it reveals a new spirit from this time. The true feeling for Gothic was dead, and the architects of the late Quattrocento could only reconcile it with their artistic conscience by flamboyant excesses. Moreover, Amadeo and his companions were sculptors first and architects second. The opportunities of Gothic were fatal in their hands. It was they who first started the building on that evil course of elaborate and excessive ornamentation which has made it what it is to-day—a building generally admired for its resemblance to a monstrous sugar-cake. Their lead was followed with an ever-diminishing sense of artistic propriety and an increasing love for florid effect by their successors in the middle and latter part of the sixteenth century. The impulse imparted to the work by the zeal of Carlo Borromeo and the great religious 232revival, expressed itself only in cold and uninspired artistic platitudes, the emptiness of which is ill concealed by superficial exaggerations. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are represented by an increase of bad taste and meretricious effect, and the story of the long evolution of the temple ends in a climax of bombast in the Napoleonic era, to which is owed the present grandiose fa?ade and the battalions of pinnacles which crown the whole edifice.

CUPOLA OF THE DUOMO, FROM THE ROOF.

233A building conceived in a spirit foreign to the place where it was to rise, and carried out by men to whom its design and idea was naturally unsympathetic and incomprehensible, through ages in which all the original inspiration was lost, could not well be a wholly satisfactory achievement. Milan Cathedral sins grievously against the principles of pure Gothic. The pointed style is carried in it to an acuteness in which all grace and flexibility of line is lost. In fretful moments one feels that these endless sharp angles scrape one’s nerves. The effect of solidity and strength has been completely sacrificed for the sake of ornamentation, and dignity and repose lost in a restless reiteration of trivial details. The huge-ribbed flanks gape with enormous windows. Every nook and cranny, every jag and angle is crowded with statues. The outlines of the roof are frilled by an elaborately-pierced balustrade with crocketed pinnacles. From the central roof to the lower level of the side aisles spring a host of flying buttresses, so perforated that they look like wisps of foam rather than solid props intended to support the fabric. A myriad spears quiver upwards from the roof far into the sky, and upon each dances a statue. No wonder that the guides call upon you to admire its likeness to lacework or confectionery, and that people compare it to a drift of snow, a billow dashing into spray, a white mountain bird alighted in the midst of the city—anything except a building of solid bones and substance.

Restorations and continual repairs have almost effaced the handiwork of the original builders. The north-east part of the exterior is the most ancient. The three magnificent windows of the apse, with their rich tracery, are one of the most beautiful features of 234the original design. And amid the swarms of baroque saints, in every contorted attitude of theatric sentiment, which have settled on this part, as everywhere over the building—four thousand four hundred and forty, outside and in, they say—a patient observer may pick out some which, by their dignified simplicity, refinement and repose, show the purer taste of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. The lowest figures on the northernmost window of the apse are an Adam and Eve, and have been attributed to Antonio Rizzo, a fifteenth century Venetian sculptor, known by his work in the cortile of the Doge’s Palace. Cristoforo Solari, Andrea Fusina, Tomaso da Cazzaniga, il Bambaia, are all represented by sculptures on the apse. Higher up are works by earlier and less accomplished hands, huge gargoyles of fantastic form—dragons, a serpent coiled round the nude body of a woman, a child entwining itself with a bough, a female figure with great curling hair, a siren with bat’s wings—monstrous creations of the Northern fancy, which dominated in the first years of the Cathedral. Beneath these gargoyles are ranged the so-called Giganti, colossal statues of warriors, heralds, huntsmen, foresters, slaves—figures of romance and of the rude fields too. Some are by German sculptors, and by Lombards under their influence; others of rather later date show new and realistic tendencies.

There is little of interest on the south side and in the lower end of the exterior. The monotonous length of the vast flanks is unbroken by the rich interest of doorways, such as were originally projected. The classic fa?ade is frankly discordant, though it is no less thickly littered with bad sculptures. The bronze doors of the middle entrance are a very recent work, showing the hark back of the modern sculptor to Quattrocento models. But if the exterior of the Duomo 235lacks in impressiveness, the interior makes amends. Wonder and awe overwhelm one on entering. In the dim religious light from the great stained windows, one is aware of vast echoing aisles, of mighty columns passing away, one behind the other, into depths and distances of rich gloom, where the pointed lines of arch behind arch become visible, broken by long slits of glowing glass. A quiet reigns as of places untrodden by earthly things. Pigmy human forms creep here and there over the immense expanses of the pavement, or kneel at the foot of a column, bowed in devotion.

In this solemn interior it seems as if the native and foreign ideals had united for once, with harmonious result. Here is the breadth and spaciousness of Latin thought—the loftiness of Gothic. With its five aisles, transepts and apsidal east end, the church is of striking simplicity. There are no chapels built out, few side altars, and few monuments. The High Altar, with its canopy, and the florid pulpits and marble screen round the sanctuary, are the only conspicuous objects. There is little incident in the building itself. A feeling gains upon one, after a time, of a certain emptiness, monotony, even poverty, in all this grandeur of height and space. The inadequacy of the short light arches of the nave, in comparison with the colossal shafts supporting them becomes visible, and the eye is offended by the shameless deception of the roof, which is painted to simulate open tracery, and give a false effect of added height. The endless repetition of line and arch ends by being wearisome, and one longs for the rich symmetric light and shade of triforium and clerestory, for the beautiful mouldings, the star blackness of trefoil and quatrefoil piercings, and for all that deep and varied interest which grows upon the eye slowly, and in just relation to general 236effect, in the best Gothic architecture. The curious and elaborate capitals, like huge rings, are the most conspicuous details here. Each in itself is a wonderful piece of Gothic ornament, with arcades and crocketed pinnacles and niches filled with statues, but they are so high up that one can hardly appreciate them in detail. As capitals, one must quarrel with them. They do not seem natural members of the columns, but things put on merely for effect, and look as if they were meant to slip up and down, and might be at the bottom as well as at the top. That on the great pier to the left of the High Altar is said to be the handiwork of Heinrich von Gmünd, and to have been the model of the rest. The statues which decorate the lofty interior of the cupola, high up, are in the characteristic manner of the late fifteenth century Lombard sculptors, and the busts of the Fathers of the Church in the spandrils are by Cristoforo Solari. The rest of the ornamentation in the church is mostly of the Borromean and later periods. It is the ascetic cardinal’s fault that all the picturesque incrustations which had gathered upon the old building, with priceless historic associations, are missing. He ruthlessly swept away the shades of the rich and lively past, its profanities and sincerities together. The tombs of the old Lords of Milan, Visconti and Sforza, in the ambulatory, were cleared away, and other monuments were destroyed or displaced in too zealous obedience to the decree of the Council of Trent, forbidding the burial of bodies in monuments in churches. The doors in the transepts were walled up, and his favourite sculptor, Pellegrino Tebaldi, a belated follower of Michaelangelo, whose neo-classic predilections were in utter disaccord with the spirit of the building, was set to work to re-garnish its devastated spaces.
237

WITHIN THE DUOMO.

238There are no paintings of account in the church. 239The few pictures belong to the same period as the altars, designed by il Pellegrini, over which they hang. The original Gothic design did not admit of frescoes on the walls. The necessary colour is given by the windows. In many of these the glass is modern, but some very fine fifteenth and sixteenth century glass still survives. It has not the supreme beauty of very early glass; the designs are pictorial, but the colour is gorgeously rich and deep, and in the earlier ones the subjects are treated with due regard for decorative effect.

A few things of interest may indeed be found in the vast spaces of the nave and ambulatory. Low down against the north wall is the rude granite tomb of Archbishop Ariberto, eleventh century, brought hither in 1783 from the suppressed Church of St. Dionysius. The ancient crucifix of Byzantine style above it, upon the foot of which is a relief of Ariberto holding a model of St. Calimero, a church restored by him, is said, but without foundation, to be the crucifix which used to be carried into battle on the Caroccio. Beneath a window further up stands a sarcophagus, raised upon columns of Verona marble; in it are the bones of the two Visconte Archbishops, Otto, Lord of Milan in the thirteenth century, and his great grand-nephew Giovanni, who ruled See and city in the first half of the fourteenth, and who elected to be laid with his great predecessor when he died. The recumbent statue of Giovanni on the top is probably by a Campionese master. This monument, which had once an honourable place in the apse, is the only memorial in the church of the great family which founded it. Higher up is the Gothic tomb of Marco Caselli, a merchant who died in 1394, and gave his large fortune to the building of the Cathedral. The tomb was designed by Filippino da Modena, but the recumbent statue and the figures of Evangelists and Fathers on 240the front and sides are by another hand, a Venetian or a Lombard influenced by the Venetian school.[4] We come next to a refined little sixteenth century monument to Giovanni Antonio Vimercati, by Agostino Busti, il Bambaia. Three altars designed by il Pellegrini follow. Over the last there is a bas-relief of Madonna with SS. Cather............