Milan: Duomo

 

 Edward Hutton disliked the exterior of Milan's famous Duomo but had nothing but praise for its spacious interior.

The Duomo of Milan, the most famous and the greatest Gothic building in Italy, was projected and built by the Visconti, and first by Gian Galeazzo Visconti in 1386, and therefore at a time when the Gothic style had already begun to show signs of decadence and exhaustion. It is in no sense an Italian building. It was not Milan which built it, as Florence and Siena built their cathedrals, but the tyrant Visconti. It was not a Latin idea or a Latin enthusiasm which conjured this vast and astonishing thing out of the mountains and the soil of Italy: the Duomo of Milan is the result of a particular, probably foreign, and certainly belated fancy for Northern work. It was conceived by Gian Galeazzo Visconti, who had been a great traveller.

 

All-powerful in Lombardy, the ambition of this strong and unscrupulous tyrant was to place upon his head the crown of Italy and to dominate the whole peninsula. With this hope in his heart, he undertook the building of the greatest of all Italian churches, and he fashioned it after the manner of those he had seen in the monarchies of the North.

 

As we see it to-day, the Cathedral of Milan is the result of a collaboration between German, probably south German, architects and Italian engineers…and, as we shall see, what is chiefly to be admired and loved in the building is due to what these Latins were able to make of German work….

 

For if a cathedral is to live, it must be an expression of national consciousness, not of individual desire. That the Cathedral of Milan is a living thing we owe to the Italian engineers who followed the German architects. …

As we see it, the Cathedral has five naves, and this, as I understand it, is necessary to the fundamental  Latin desire that makes of the church, in spite of the Germans and the style, a really Latin and a living thing: the desire for space….

 

So much for the plan and the building itself. The gothic detail and ornament are very different matters.  These are quite inanimate, without expression or charm, as dead everywhere as the work of our own day, and indeed they might be the very work of our hands….What saves the Cathedral from barbarism is not the profuseness of its weakness, but the nobility and splendour of its spaciousness, and the beauty and spiritual effect of just that….

 

The effect of the Cathedral without is in fact altogether false, vulgar, and disappointing…. If without, the Cathedral of Milan, lost in its confusion of detail, its thousands of statues, its restless fretwork and innumerable pinnacles, fails to win from us  anything but wonder, within, lets us confess it at once, it overwhelms us altogether by its sheer grandeur and nobility. The true height of the roof is not only at once apparent and even exaggerated by the fact that it is upheld by giant pillars which rise unbroken to the vaults, without either triforium or clerestory; but the vast size of the church is understood at once, its nobility not of height only  but of breadth and spaciousness. …The church covers an area of 14,000 square yards and will hold 40,000 people. Thus it is, I suppose, the largest Gothic church in existence. Its contents, however, save for a few tombs and the works collected in the sacristy, are of meagre interest, and in this respect, it is probably the poorest cathedral in the world.

 

###

 

Edward Hutton: The Cities of Lombardy, New York, 1912. Pp. 98-101.