OF THE GREAT Italian cities only Milan has been comprehensively cut off from its hinterland by modern building. So it is reassuring to ascend the campanile of the cathedral on a clear winter’s day and see the Monte Rosa gleaming on the horizon. Milan has a complex past – Roman, Byzantine and Lungobard – and has long been the dominant city of Lombardy. Power passed in the twelfth century from the archbishops to the commune, and in 1277 the Visconti established their signoria. Their duchy was taken over in 1450 by Francesco I Sforza, whose younger son Ludovico il Moro is celebrated not least as the patron of Leonardo. The French endeavoured to secure Milan, but on the extinction of the Sforza line in 1535, this passed to Spain and, in the early eighteenth century, to Austria. The French invasion of 1796 led to the creation of the Cisalpine republic, of which Milan was the inevitable capital, and its successor, Bonaparte’s kingdom of Italy. The Austrians recovered Milan in 1814, retaining it until 1859, when it was absorbed in the new kingdom of Italy, of which it was to become the financial powerhouse.
The Stazione Centrale – as good a place to arrive as any – is a gargantuan statement of Italian ambition. Designed in 1906, this took a quarter of a century to build. And later you may wish to linger in an earlier and more engaging statement of national confidence, the cruciform Galleria, with its patriotic dedication: ‘A Vittorio Emanuele II dai Milanesi’ (To Vittorio Emanuele II from the Milanese). This most spectacular of shopping arcades, off the Piazza del Duomo, was begun in 1865, and like the station remains close to the pulse of Milanese life.
Even a brief study of a map shows how Milan grew: the clearly marked line of the later walls, the names of whose gates survive, and the roughly oval circuit of streets that marks the earlier walls with which the massive brick Castello Sforzesco was associated. The Piazza del Duomo lies at the geographical centre, presided over by the unhappy façade of the Duomo itself. It is within that the great building asserts its magic, the tall columns soaring to the vaults. By day the Renaissance stained glass deserves study; at night, as candles glitter, one is lost in a primordial forest of stone. The decoration is rich, and there are two exceptional masterpieces. The Trivulzio candelabrum in the north transept, with its monsters and humans emerging from trailing fronds, is a prodigy of Norman medieval metalwork, so it is disgraceful that the tourist is now denied access to it; while the tomb of Gian Giacomo de’ Medici of 1560–63 in the south transept is arguably the masterpiece of Leone Leoni.
Milan is famous for its churches. The Basilica di Sant’Ambrogio, dedicated to the patron of the city, was the seminal building of the Lombard Romanesque; while in Santa Maria delle Grazie to the north-west, the domed crossing and choir added by Bramante to the late Gothic nave represent the consummation of late fifteenth-century Milanese classical architecture. The church and its cloister are visually more compelling than the abused ghost of Leonardo’s Last Supper in the refectory nearby.
If you want to escape from fellow tourists there is a particularly satisfying walk from the Piazza del Duomo. Take the Via Torino and pause at the first church, set back on the left, San Satiro, where Bramante’s ingenious trompe l’oeil treatment of the choir disguises the constraints of the site. Further on, to the right, is San Giorgio al Palazzo, with a chapel decorated in 1516 by the most consistent Milanese painter of the period, Bernardino Luini, whose altarpiece of the Deposition is beautifully complemented by his frescoes. Head on for the Porta Ticinese, but stop at San Lorenzo, set behind a row of sixteen Roman columns that were pillaged from earlier buildings and re-erected as part of the portico of the basilica. Much of the original structure, datable about ad 400, survives. The scale of the building is impressive, but inevitably it is overlaid with much later work. Further south, just before the gate, is Sant’Eustorgio, another early foundation, rebuilt in the late eleventh century, but with an elegant campanile of 1297–1309. The church itself is fine. But it is for the Cappella Portinari, to the east of the choir, that one returns. Pigello Portinari ran the Milanese branch of the Medici bank and called in a fellow Florentine, Michelozzo, to design his chapel. The frescoes of 1466–8 are, however, by the outstanding Lombard master of the time, Vincenzo Foppa. Nowhere is the sobriety of the man more eloquently expressed. In the chapel is the fourteenth-century arca of the Dominican Saint Peter Martyr by the Pisan Giovanni di Balduccio and his assistants, which demonstrates that Portinari followed in a long tradition when he employed Tuscans in Milan.
Santa Maria presso San Celso, façade by Galeazzo Alessi, 1565 and later.
To return by an alternative route make east for the Corso Italia. On the opposite side of this is Santa Maria presso San Celso. Work started in 1490 under the direction of a sequence of architects: Galeazzo Alessi’s front was begun in 1560. There are outstanding altarpieces by Bergognone and the Venetian Paris Bordon, among others. Returning northwards you pass San Paolo Converso with a vigorous façade designed by the painter Giovanni Battista Crespi, il Cerano. Turning right immediately after the church, you emerge on the Corso di Piazza Romana opposite San Nazzaro Maggiore, which is entered through the remarkable funerary chapel of the Trivulzio, designed by an earlier painter, Bartolommeo Suardi, il Bramantino. Not far to the north of this is Sant’Antonio Abbate with pictures by many leading Lombard painters of the post-Renaissance period, including – flanking an altar on the left – Giulio Cesare Procaccini’s poignant Visitation. Between this and the Duomo, behind the Palazzo Reale, is San Gottardo al Corte, a Visconti foundation of 1330–6, with a splendid campanile and Cerano’s visionary San Carlo Borromeo.
San Paolo Converso, facade by Giovanni Battista Crespi, 1611 and later.
The museums of Milan are justly celebrated. It makes sense to visit them in chronological sequence. The earliest, the Ambrosiana, was founded by Cardinal Federico Borromeo and still contains much of the remarkable collection he presented to it in 1618, including the celebrated profile portrait of a lady long given to Leonardo, a distinguished group of panels by Luini, Caravaggio’s only pure still life, a key series of works on copper by Jan Breughel the Elder and a most remarkable survival, Raphael’s majestic cartoon for the School of Athens. Other early acquisitions include Leonardo’s wonderful Portrait of a Musician.
Housed in the former seat of the Jesuits, the Pinacoteca di Brera was founded in 1803. Milan, as the capital of the Cisalpine republic, received a not ungenerous proportion of the spoils looted by the French from elsewhere in Italy – and because the city reverted to Habsburg rule in 1814 there was no question of restitution. The religious houses of Lombardy were despoiled – the Brera’s holding of Lombard masters is unrivalled – as were those of Venice. The Papal States in particular suffered grievous losses: from the Marche come Gentile da Fabriano’s Valleromita polyptych, Piero della Francesca’s incomparable Montefeltro altarpiece and a group of Crivellis only outshone in the National Gallery at London; and from Città di Castello in Umbria, Raphael’s peerless early Marriage of the Virgin. Beauharnais, Bonaparte’s viceroy, himself presented what is perhaps the most moving picture in the collection, Bellini’s poignant Pietà. Among the later pictures are Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus and Bellotto’s breathtakingly fresh views of Gazzada.
More recent pictures, by such artists as Francesco Hayez and Gioanni Segantini, are shown in the Galleria d’Arte Moderna, housed in the neoclassical Villa Reale, built in 1790 for the Belgioioso family. Very different in character is the Museo Poldi Pezzoli. Gian Giacomo Poldi Pezzoli, who died in 1879, left his collection to the public. Although this core donation has been vastly expanded, the museum still just retains something of the atmosphere of a private house. Works of art complement the pictures, the most memorable of which, Pollaiuolo’s familiar profile Portrait of a Woman, two distinguished Botticellis and the Mantegna Madonna, formed part of the original bequest. The collection makes an interesting contrast with its somewhat later counterpart in the Palazzo Bagatti Valsecchi. This was built in the Lombard Renaissance style by Giuseppe and Fausto Bagatti Valsecchi, whose pioneering taste for cycling was matched by their connoisseurship. Bellini’s majestic Saint Giustina has pride of place in the most atmospheric neo-Renaissance private house in Italy.
The Castello Sforzesco is for the determined sightseer. The vast quadrangular fortress of the Visconti and their Sforza successors was subjected to a ‘radical’ restoration from 1893 onwards. Nowhere else can Lombard Renaissance sculpture be studied so comprehensively. Bambaia’s recumbent effigy of Gaston de Foix represents its high point, but now suffers from the proximity of Michelangelo’s visionary, if unfinished, late Rondanini Pietà. Both are abominably displayed. In the substantial Sala della Balla on the first floor are the tapestries of the Months designed for Leonardo’s patron Marshal Trivulzio by Bramantino and woven at Vigevano. Wonderfully imaginative in detail, these are arguably the most accomplished tapestries ever executed in Italy and certainly stand comparison with the finest Flemish productions of their time. Rather oddly they are hung in reverse order.
Castello Sforzesco: after Bramantino, December from the Trivulzio Months, tapestry (detail).