Milan Cathedral

• 1. Introduction

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  Milan Cathedral stands at the exact center of what was once the Roman city of Mediolanum, on the site of the ancient public basilica facing the forum. Its full name is the Metropolitan Cathedral-Basilica of the Nativity of Saint Mary, though the city has always simply called it the Duomo. Construction began in 1386. The final portal was inaugurated on the 6th of January 1965. That is nearly six centuries between the first stone and the last detail.

  No other church of its scale took so long to finish. No single ruler, no single architect, and no single century can claim it. What drove the building forward, stopped it dead, argued over every arch and window, and finally pushed it to completion is a story involving medieval dukes, Renaissance masters, French engineers, a conquering emperor, and a steady accumulation of marble from a quarry donated to the cathedral in perpetuity. The questions worth asking are not just how it was built but why it became such a battleground, whose ambitions it served, and what visitors from Mark Twain to Oscar Wilde made of the result.

• 2. Ancient Ground

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  The Battistero Paleocristiano, the old octagonal baptistery lying underneath the present cathedral, dates to 335. Visitors can still descend to see it. Long before Archbishop Antonio da Saluzzo broke ground in 1386, the site had already held multiple sacred buildings layered one atop another over a thousand years.

  A fire in 1075 damaged the original cathedral complex, which had grown to include an adjoining basilica erected in 836. That disaster prompted a rebuilding which became the Duomo we know. The first "new basilica," dedicated to St Thecla, had been completed as far back as 355. Its plan, the source notes, appears to share a resemblance with a contemporaneous church found beneath Tower Hill in London, hinting at a common architectural language across early Christian Europe. When construction of the new Duomo began in 1386, three buildings were demolished to clear the way: the palace of the Archbishop, the Ordinari Palace, and the Baptistry of St. Stephen at the Spring. The old church of Santa Maria Maggiore was simply used as a stone quarry.

• 3. Politics in Stone

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  Archbishop Antonio da Saluzzo began building in 1386, and the timing was deliberate. His cousin, Gian Galeazzo Visconti, had just come to power in Milan, taking over from the tyrannical Barnabò Visconti. The new cathedral was intended as a gift to the noble and working classes who had suffered under Barnabò's rule.

  But Gian Galeazzo had his own agenda. He chose to maintain his court in Pavia, not Milan, just as his father Galeazzo II had done. The Milanese, anxious about being sidelined, used the cathedral project to assert their city's centrality. The building was a political statement as much as a religious one.

  The friction sharpened when Gian Galeazzo attempted to insert the funeral monument of his father into the cathedral's central section, intending to transform the Duomo into the dynastic mausoleum of the Visconti family. The factory management and the citizens of Milan resisted fiercely. They wanted to preserve the building as a civic monument, not a royal tomb. Gian Galeazzo was forced to abandon the plan and redirect his dynastic ambitions elsewhere. He founded a separate construction site for that purpose: the Certosa di Pavia.

  When Gian Galeazzo died in 1402, almost half the cathedral was complete. Work then stalled nearly completely until 1480, held back by a lack of money and ideas.

• 4. The Engineers Disagree

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  Simone da Orsenigo took the first engineering lead in 1387, planning a cathedral built from brick in Lombard Gothic style. That vision was already shifting by 1389, when a French chief engineer, Nicolas de Bonaventure, was appointed and brought Rayonnant Gothic into the design.

  The conflict between local and imported approaches ran through the entire early period. Jean Mignot, another French architect called from Paris in 1399, evaluated all the work done and declared it in pericolo di ruina, meaning "peril of ruin," on the grounds that it had been done sine scienzia, or "without science." His forecasts turned out to be wrong. But the confrontation pushed Gian Galeazzo's engineers to improve their instruments and methods, which proved useful as they attempted to lift stones to heights that had not been attempted before.

  The most famous competition in the cathedral's building history came in 1488, when both Leonardo da Vinci and Donato Bramante submitted models for the central cupola. Leonardo later withdrew his submission. From 1500 to 1510, under Ludovico Sforza, the octagonal cupola was completed and decorated inside with four series of 15 statues each, depicting saints, prophets, sibyls, and other figures from the Bible. The exterior of the cupola remained plain except for the Guglietto dell'Amadeo, a small Renaissance spire constructed between 1507 and 1510, which managed to harmonize with the cathedral's overall Gothic character despite its different stylistic origins.

• 5. Borromeo and the Battle Over Style

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  Carlo Borromeo's accession to the archbishop's throne triggered an immediate purge. All lay monuments were removed from the Duomo, including the sarcophagi of Giovanni and Filippo Maria Visconti, Francesco I and his wife Bianca, and Galeazzo Maria. Where those tombs ended up is unknown.

  Borromeo's larger project was a complete reorientation of the cathedral's visual identity. He and his appointed chief engineer, Pellegrino Pellegrini, wanted a Renaissance appearance that would stress the building's Roman and Italian character, deliberately suppressing the Gothic style that they now viewed as foreign. Pellegrini designed a new facade with columns, obelisks, and a large tympanum. The design prompted a competition that drew nearly a dozen entries, including one by Antonio Barca. None of them were built.

  The interior, however, was steadily enriched. In 1571, Borromeo appointed Pellegrini, a controversial choice because the appointment required revising the Fabbrica's statutes. Pellegrini rebuilt the presbytery between 1575 and 1585 and added new altars and a baptistry. The wooden choir stalls for the main altar were completed by 1614, the work of Francesco Brambilla. In 1577, Borromeo formally consecrated the whole edifice as a new church, distinct from the old Santa Maria Maggiore and Santa Tecla, which had themselves been unified in 1549 after prolonged disputes.

• 6. Napoleon and the Facade

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  On the 20th of May 1805, Napoleon Bonaparte, on the verge of being crowned King of Italy, ordered the facade to be finished. He promised that the French treasury would cover all costs. That reimbursement was never paid. The Fabbrica had to sell real estate to fund the work. Nevertheless, within seven years the facade was complete.

  The supervising architect was Pellicani, who followed Carlo Buzzi's earlier Gothic plan, with some neo-Gothic additions on the upper windows. The whole sequence of the facade's design history had been contentious for over a century. Federico Borromeo had laid the foundations with Francesco Maria Richini and Fabio Mangone at the start of the 17th century. Five portals and two middle windows were built by 1638. Then in 1649, chief architect Carlo Buzzi reversed direction entirely, proposing to wrap the partly-finished details inside large Gothic pilasters and two giant belfries. Designs by Filippo Juvarra in 1733 and Luigi Vanvitelli in 1745 were considered and rejected. Napoleon's intervention cut through decades of argument by simply insisting the work be done.

  A statue of Napoleon was placed at the top of one of the spires as an act of thanksgiving. He was also crowned King of Italy at the Duomo. The facade went through a full renovation from 2003 to early 2009, after which the Candoglia marble was again visible in its original colors.

• 7. Art, Monuments, and the Meridian Line

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  Marco d'Agrate's Saint Bartholomew Flayed, placed in the cathedral in 1562, remains its most discussed single statue. The saint is depicted carrying his own flayed skin draped over his shoulders like a liturgical stole. The Trivulzio Candelabrum, dating to the 12th century and attributed in its base to Nicolas of Verdun, stands in the transepts in two pieces, its lower section dense with vines, vegetables, and imaginary animals.

  High in the dome above the apse, a small red light marks the resting place of a nail reputedly from the Crucifixion. It is retrieved and exhibited annually during the Rite of the Nivola. The 5-manual, 225-rank pipe organ, built jointly by Tamburini and Mascioni on Mussolini's command, is the largest organ in Italy.

  From the 1st of December 1786, the Austrian Empire adopted what it called "transalpine time." To help standardize clocks across Milan, a meridian line was built on the floor of the Duomo by astronomers Giovanni Angelo Cesaris and Francesco Reggio, with Roger Boscovich as consultant. A hole was cut in the roof at a height of 24 m near the south wall. When the beam of sunlight crossed the brass line on the floor, a signal was relayed to the Palazzo dei Giureconsulti, then to Sforzesco Castle, and a cannon was fired to announce solar noon. Every clock in the city was set by that shot. When the line was re-examined in 1976, the deviation was no more than 7 mm in azimuth and 14 mm in level, still accurate enough to fix solar noon to within 2 seconds.

• 8. Witnesses and Their Verdicts

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  Mark Twain visited Milan in the summer of 1867 and gave over chapter 18 of Innocents Abroad to the cathedral. He described it as "so grand, so solemn, so vast! And yet so delicate, so airy, so graceful!" He compared its appearance to "a delusion of frostwork that might vanish with a breath" and said he could not understand how it could be second to anything made by human hands.

  Oscar Wilde saw it differently. He visited in June 1875 and wrote to his mother that the facade design was "monstrous and inartistic" and that the cathedral was "an awful failure," though imposing through sheer scale. John Ruskin was more systematic in his dismissal, writing that the building stole "from every style in the world: and every style spoiled," reserving particular contempt for the plastered ceiling painted to imitate carved tracery, which he called a "gross degradation."

  Henry James occupied the middle ground. He acknowledged the force of Ruskin's criticisms while describing the cathedral as "grandly curious and superbly rich" and "a supreme embodiment of vigorous effort." His account in Italian Hours also includes an episode involving the relics of Saint Charles Borromeo in the crypt, where for five francs a visitor could watch a sacristan crank open a sliding shutter to reveal the saint's glass coffin, the desiccated remains dressed in mouldering canonicals and mitred, glittering with diamonds, emeralds, and sapphires donated by historic patrons.

  The last portal, opened on the 6th of January 1965, was the formal close of the building campaign, though some uncarved blocks remain to be finished as statues.