Milan: Church of St. Ambrose

 After providing a brief life of St. Ambrose, Edward Hutton entered into an extended discussion of the outstanding features of the church founded by the great saint. 

 

Then S. Ambrose founded his new church and dedicated it to SS. Gervasius and Protasius. It was, of course, a building of the fourth century. Nothing would seem to remain of the  building which Uraias the Goth probably destroyed. The present church, under the dedication of S. Ambrose, who lies there between S. Gervasius and S. Protasius, under the high altar, dates in part from the ninth century, when it was refounded by another Archbishop of Milan, Aspertus: much of the building, however, would seem to belong to the twelfth century. Nevertheless, we have in S. Ambrogio not only the oldest ecclesiastical building in Milan, but a church which, in spite of rebuilding and the restoration of Cardinal Federigo Borromeo and of our own time, recalls us in its plan certainly to very early times, and remains one of the most beautiful and interesting buildings in Italy. …

 

It is a simple basilica upheld by vast round arches of brick carried by great pillars between which galleries are set borne by other round arches of brickwork….The nave is thrice crossed by great arches which divide the roof as it were into three blind domes. Beyond these the sanctuary is covered by an exquisite open lantern, so that a flood of light falls upon the beautiful baldacchino and high altar and is thrown upon the mosaics in the half gloom of the tribune. Here, high above a crypt the choir is set in the semicircle of the apse….

 

The lovely marble screen of the choir might seem, too, very early work, while the exquisite baldacchino upheld by four Roman pillars of red porphyry… is probably of the twelfth century. This baldacchino, perhaps the loveliest thing in the church, is exquisitely carved in the Byzantine manner… I have said that perhaps the baldacchino was perhaps the loveliest thing in the church. I had forgotten—had I forgotten?—the palliotto of gold and of silver which enclose the altar and is itself enclosed in a case or safe of steel, locked by twelve keys, two for each door, and so precious that it costs no less then five lire even to see it. It was made more than a thousand years ago by the goldsmith Vuolvinio, and given to the church by the Archbishop Angilbertus II. The front of the marvelous casket is of solid gold; it covers the whole front of the altar, and is held by a frame of moulding of pure silver: it is covered with enamels and set with precious jewels uncut. In the midst in a mandorla is Our Lord, and above, below and on either side as in a cross, are set the beasts of the Four Evangelists; on either side of the cross thus formed  are four compartments in each of which are three apostles…. Nothing, I suppose, left to us in the world of the work of the goldsmith is half so precious as this astounding and lovely casket.

Beneath the high altar, so marvelously cased and adorned, lie in a modern shrine of silver in the crypt the bones of the great archbishop and saint between those of S. Gervasius and S. Protasius. *

 ###

*Image provided by David Orme. Hutton provided an excerpt from a 1872 letter to Cardinal Newman from a correspondent who had been present at a close examination of the three skeletons. The bones of the two martyrs showed signs of a horrible execution, but the bones of S. Ambrose were "wholly uninjured."

 

Edward Hutton: The Cities of Lombardy, New York, 1912. Pp. 87-90.

Milan: St. Ambrose

Edward Hutton prefaced his  visit to Milan's church of S. Ambrogio with a discussion of the great man whose shrine it is. In his writings on Italy, Hutton included a number of biographies of saints, most of them not well known outside of their localities. But S. Ambrogio (St. Ambrose) was a different story. Born in 340 the son of a Roman patrician, his own achievements were so great that he became Bishop of Milan by popular acclamation even before he was baptized. As Bishop of Milan he went on to have a profound effect on history.*

 

And yet I must confess that the one certain and enduring impression I always receive in Milan does not come to me from these beautiful and lonely columns, but from a church, the Church of S. Ambrogio, which for all that it is a building of the ninth century and of the twelfth, carries me back at once to what often seems to me the most wonderful, as it is certainly the most fundamental, of those three centuries upon which Christendom has stood so strong; I mean the last century before the Barbarian invasion, the fourth of our era.

 

That wonderful and so fruitful age, so strangely neglected and so wilfully misjudged by our historians, is here in Milan, and especially in S. Ambrogio, brought vividly before us by the memory of the great Saint who dominated it, and whose shrine, rightly understood, the beautiful Church of S. Ambrogio, remains to this day.

 I suppose that to most men S. Ambrogio appears if at all, first as one of the Four doctors of the Latin Church, and then as a divine poet, the author for instance of the lovely Christmas hymn, Jesu Redemptor Omnium, which coming to us faintly in the early twilight on Christmas Eve, presently in the midnight hour fills all the sky and mingles itself with the song of the angels.  One remembers him, too, as the author of the ritual which bears his name, and of a certain manner of chanting named after him, and more especially perhaps as the Bishop who received S. Augustine into the Church, who baptized him, and, as it is said, composed with him an antiphon  the most wonderful of those proses which are wholly Christian in their origin, the Te Deum.

Jesu Redemptor Omnium
See Below for brief video

 

But S. Ambrose was something beside a poet, he was a very great man of action and a Saint. On his lips we hear not only the loveliest lines of Christian poetry, then at last come to perfection, but the most significant words of an age at least as subtle as our own. Rightly understood, the whole of S. Ambrose’s life was devoted to the establishment of Europe, of Christendom, that it might endure. He was not only sure of himself, he was sure of what he achieved. As the great enemy of Arianism, he was not merely combating what our indifferent age would consider a matter of pure opinion in an incomprehensible theology, he was laying with the utmost forethought and intention the indestructible foundations of European society and civilization, that the flood which was about to sweep all else away might not overwhelm them. Out of the ruins of the Empire we have constructed Europe, because he and the Church he served secured those foundations which are the vast monoliths of the Nicene Creed….

 

It is impossible to give any real impression of what the rule of Ambrose was in Milan, or even in such a book as this, of the Milan of that day. The most gentle of men, full of charity, learned and wise, he was yet a great statesman and a saint: his government passes before our eyes to the constant clash of arms, amid innumerable tumults, as when barricaded in the Portian Basilica, surrounded by thousands of the people of Milan, he is compelled to face  and to resist the demands of Justina the Empress, who with her young son Valentinian were Arians, and therefore the enemies  not of Ambrose only but of the Commonwealth. They demanded a church in that Milan which Ambrose had purged of heresy. He was adamant. “ My gold and my silver, nay my life, ask and they are yours; but the churches of God are not mine to give.” Such was his invariable answer.

Note: Here is a link to a brief rendition of Jesu Redemptor Omnium composed almost 1700 years ago..

 

###

*His brother and sister are also regarded as saints.

 

Edward Hutton: The Cities of Lombardy, New York, 1912. Pp. 82-86. 

Milan: Church of S. Ambrogio

After providing a brief life of St. Ambrose, Edward Hutton entered into an extended discussion of the outstanding features of the church founded by the great saint. 

 

Then S. Ambrose founded his new church and dedicated it to SS. Gervasius and Protasius. It was, of course, a building of the fourth century. Nothing would seem to remain of the  building which Uraias the Goth probably destroyed. The present church, under the dedication of S. Ambrose, who lies there between S. Gervasius and S. Protasius, under the high altar, dates in part from the ninth century, when it was refounded by another Archbishop of Milan, Aspertus: much of the building, however, would seem to belong to the twelfth century. Nevertheless, we have in S. Ambrogio not only the oldest ecclesiastical building in Milan, but a church which , in spite of rebuilding and the restoration of Cardinal Federigo Borromeo and of our own time, recalls us in its plan certainly to very early times, and remains one of the most beautiful and interesting buildings in Italy. …

 

It is a simple basilica upheld by vast round arches of brick carried by great pillars between which galleries are set borne by other round arches of brickwork….The nave is thrice crossed by great arches which divide the roof as it were into three blind domes. Beyond these the sanctuary is covered by an exquisite open lantern, so that a flood of light falls  upon the beautiful baldacchino and high altar and is thrown upon the mosaics in the half gloom of the tribune. Here, high above a crypt the choir is set in the semicircle of the apse….

 

The lovely marble screen of the choir might seem, too, very early work, while the exquisite baldacchino upheld by four Roman pillars of red porphyry… is probably of the twelfth century. This baldacchino, perhaps the loveliest thing in the church, is exquisitely carved in the Byzantine manner… I have said that perhaps the baldacchino was perhaps the loveliest thing in the church. I had forgotten—had I forgotten?—the palliotto of gold and of silver which enclose the altar and is itself enclosed in a case or safe of steel, locked by twelve keys, two for each door, and so precious that it costs no less then five lire even to see it. It was made more than a thousand years ago by the goldsmith Vuolvinio, and given to the church by the Archbishop Angilbertus II. The front of the marvelous casket is of solid gold; it covers the whole front of the altar, and is held by a frame of moulding of pure silver: it is covered with enamels and set with precious jewels uncut. In the midst in a mandorla is Our Lord, and above, below and on either side as in a cross, are set the beasts of the Four Evangelists; on either side of the cross thus formed  are four compartments in each of which are three apostles…. Nothing, I suppose, left to us in the world of the work of the goldsmith is half so precious as this astounding and lovely casket.

Beneath the high altar, so marvelously cased and adorned, lie in a modern shrine of silver in the crypt the bones of the great archbishop and saint between those of S. Gervasius and S. Protasius. *

 ###

*Image provided by David Orme. Hutton provided an excerpt from a 1872 letter to Cardinal Newman from a correspondent who had been present at a close examination of the three skeletons. The bones of the two martyrs showed signs of a horrible execution, but the bones of S. Ambrose were "wholly uninjured."

 

Edward Hutton: The Cities of Lombardy, New York, 1912. Pp. 87-90.

Milan: S. Ambrose

Edward Hutton prefaced his  visit to Milan's church of S. Ambrogio with a discussion of the great man whose shrine it is. In his writings on Italy Hutton included a number of biographies of saints, most of them not well known outside of their localities. But S. Ambrogio (St. Ambrose) was a different story. Born in 340 the son of a Roman patrician, his own achievements were so great that he became Bishop of Milan by popular acclamation even before he was baptized. As Bishop of Milan he went on to have a profound effect on history.*

 

And yet I must confess that the one certain and enduring impression I always receive in Milan does not come to me from these beautiful and lonely columns, but from a church, the Church of S. Ambrogio, which for all that it is a building of the ninth century and of the twelfth, carries me back at once to what often seems to me the most wonderful, as it is certainly the most fundamental, of those three centuries upon which Christendom has stood so strong; I mean the last century before the Barbarian invasion, the fourth of our era.

 

That wonderful and so fruitful age, so strangely neglected and so wilfully misjudged by our historians, is here in Milan, and especially in S. Ambrogio, brought vividly before us by the memory of the great Saint who dominated it, and whose shrine, rightly understood, the beautiful Church of S. Ambrogio, remains to this day.

 I suppose that to most men S. Ambrogio appears if at all, first as one of the Four doctors of the Latin Church, and then as a divine poet, the author for instance of the lovely Christmas hymn, Jesu Redemptor Omnium, which coming to us faintly in the early twilight on Christmas Eve, presently in the midnight hour fills all the sky and mingles itself with the song of the angels.  One remembers him, too, as the author of the ritual which bears his name, and of a certain manner of chanting named after him, and more especially perhaps as the Bishop who received S. Augustine into the Church, who baptized him, and, as it is said, composed with him an antiphon  the most wonderful of those proses which are wholly Christian in their origin, the Te Deum.

Jesu Redemptor Omnium
See Below for brief video

 

But S. Ambrose was something beside a poet, he was a very great man of action and a Saint. On his lips we hear not only the loveliest lines of Christian poetry, then at last come to perfection, but the most significant words of an age at least as subtle as our own. Rightly understood, the whole of S. Ambrose’s life was devoted to the establishment of Europe, of Christendom, that it might endure. He was not only sure of himself, he was sure of what he achieved. As the great enemy of Arianism, he was not merely combating what our indifferent age would consider a matter of pure opinion in an incomprehensible theology, he was laying with the utmost forethought and intention the indestructible foundations of European society and civilization, that the flood which was about to sweep all else away might not overwhelm them. Out of the ruins of the Empire we have constructed Europe, because he and the Church he served secured those foundations which are the vast monoliths of the Nicene Creed….

 

It is impossible to give any real impression of what the rule of Ambrose was in Milan, or even in such a book as this, of the Milan of that day. The most gentle of men, full of charity, learned and wise, he was yet a great statesman and a saint: his government passes before our eyes to the constant clash of arms, amid innumerable tumults, as when barricaded in the Portian Basilica, surrounded by thousands of the people of Milan, he is compelled to face  and to resist the demands of Justina the Empress, who with her young son Valentinian were Arians, and therefore the enemies  not of Ambrose only but of the Commonwealth. They demanded a church in that Milan which Ambrose had purged of heresy. He was adamant. “ My gold and my silver, nay my life, ask and they are yours; but the churches of God are not mine to give.” Such was his invariable answer.

Note: Here is a link to a brief rendition of Jesu Redemptor Omnium composed almost 1700 years ago..

 

###

*His brother and sister are also regarded as saints.

 

Edward Hutton: The Cities of Lombardy, New York, 1912. Pp. 82-86.