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how the relationship between Florence and Milan influenced art history
Italy united as a country only in 1861. Before that, during the Middle Ages and the Modern period, Italian peninsula was split between different states, which often fought against each other. The Republic of Venice, the Duchy of Milan, the Papal State or the Kingdom of Naples were in constant competition and rivalry.
At the same time, cultural unity of Italy was granted by the common Roman heritage and by shared political interests. Political alliances between the different states favoured cultural exchange between these environments and put people, ideas and styles in motion.
Today, when we travel across Italy, we can trace these movements and map the artists’ travels and experiences. We can search for Michelangelo in Rome, Donatello in Padua, Verrocchio in Venice.
During the fifteenth century the Duchy of Milan was one of the most important players on the Italian political scene. Intense political contacts between the Medici family and the Milanese court resulted in a flourishing exchange between the two countries.
I wanted to investigate this subject more in depth, therefore, I asked my colleague Giacomo Zavatteri, a Milanese art historian and professional tour guide, to tell us more about the artistic relationship between the two cities.
How did Florence influence Milan? How did Milan influence Florence? Let us discover that together thanks to Giacomo’s article:
We all know the importance of Florence for the European art history. Florence is where Cimabue and Giotto came from, this is where Italian Renaissance was born. Without Florence we wouldn’t have Donatello, Brunelleschi, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. The world would be a different place.
What is less known is the importance of cultural exchange between Florence, Northern Italy and Milan occured between the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance.
Giotto and Milan
Between 1335 and 1336 Giotto himself lived in Milan. The artist worked at the court of the Visconti, who ruled the city at that time. Unfortunately, nothing remains from the works he painted at the palace, called today the Ducal Palace. However, his painting exercised a profound influence on the art in our region. If you visit today the court church of San Gottardo in Milan, you can admire there the remains of a beautiful Crucifixion which displays many innovations of Giotto’s painting, such as the interest in representation of volumes and realism of portraiture. This Crucifixion was undoubtedly painted by an artist, who had a direct contact with the Tuscan master and his art.
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But Giotto was not the first and will not be the last of the great masters who left Tuscany and moved to Milan during the fourteenth century. One of them was also Giovanni di Balduccio from Pisa, who in Milan executed one of his biggest masterpieces: Saint Peter the Martyr’s Ark in the Portinari Chapel located in the church of Sant’Eustorgio.
Art and politics at the Visconti’s court
Between the fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries an ambitious political programme was launched in Milan. The rulers of the city, the Visconti family, tried to obtain a full supremacy over the Northern part of the Apennine peninsula. In 1395 the imperial title of Duke of Milan was conferred to Gian Galeazzo Visconti. It was only the first step on the way to achieve the greatest dream, the reconstruction of the Kingdom of Italy and Visconti’s coronation as Kings.
The aim of this ambitious political project was to uplift the Visconti family to the level of the great European royal dynasties. The rulers of Milan communicated and glorified these ambitions using art.
For over a century Milan continued to attract the best artists of the moment and became a bridge between the late gothic culture of the North and the Renaissance innovations coming from Tuscany. In the Lombard workshops artists who adopted the decorative International Gothic Style used to meet with these, who followed the revolutionary novelties developed in Florence.
Giotto’s realism and the three dimensionality of his painting were enriched by an interest towards the expression of emotions, meticulous detail and unrestrained passion for sentiments, so typical for the Northern culture.
The courtly paintings for the Oratorio Porro di Mocchirolo, now housed in Brera, are one of the best examples of this kind. Count Porro, Gian Galeazzo Visconti’s advisor, is represented here with a realism typical of the Renaissance portraiture.
The highest point of this first phase, during which the Lombard culture confronted the Tuscan influences, is represented by the magnificent figure of God the Father made in 1425 to decorate the arch of the main chapel in the Milanese Duomo.
The author of this work was an important goldsmith, Beltramino De Zutti. The technique he chose for this sculpture enhances its expressive force. Look at the light gleaming on God’s curly hair, his eyes, which reflect the artist’s physiognomic research and his interest in the representation of emotions. The work expresses this heritage of cultural tradition born on the crossroad between Northern Italy and Tuscany. This masterpiece projects us in the direction of the mature Renaissance style and it could not have been created in Florence, only in Milan.
Ludovico il Moro and Bramante
Let us step a little bit forward in time and move to Italy at end of the fifteenth century. The political star of the moment was Ludovico il Moro Sforza who, after the death of Lorenzo il Magnifico de’ Medici in Florence, wanted to take his place of an arbiter of the Italian political scene. Milan ruled by the Duke Sforza attracted many artists, such as Bramante or Leonardo da Vinci, who came to the city to work on his court.
By then, Milan was already enriched by the experience of the first wave of migrant artists who had brought the Renaissance style to the city. Among them was Antonio di Pietro Averlino, called Filarete. At the same time, the local art was deeply influenced by the culture originating from Padua and by the suggestions coming from the North, from Flanders and Burgundy. It is enough to think about the great masters like Foppa, Zenale and Bergognone, authors of the extremely elegant works, which prove a deep knowledge of refine Renaissance techniques.
When Ludovico il Moro takes the power, he has in mind an ambitious project. The artistic innovations imported from Florence were supposed to proclaim the glory of the prince, who was meant to wipe out the foreign rulers from Italy and to restore the peninsula to its former splendour. The church of Santa Maria delle Grazie, designed by Bramante as a family mausoleum, together with its refectory decorated by Leonardo’s Last Supper, represented the highest point of this political project.
Santa Maria delle Grazie is particularly meaningful for this confrontation between the Florentine and Milanese cultures. Bramante started his design having in mind an model example of the Florentine Renaissance architecture, which was Brunelleschi’s Old Sacristy in San Lorenzo Basilica in Florence. Ludovico il Moro’s ambition, however, brought Bramante to confront his design with the models of “imperial” churches, such as Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, that he also used as a reference for his majestic project of Duomo in Pavia, and with the Milanese church of San Lorenzo Maggiore.
Only few know that San Lorenzo Maggiore was built in Late Antiquity and most probably functioned as a palatine chapel related to the Roman imperial power. How could Duke of Milan resist the confront with the most important Emperors of the past? Lombard architects completed Bramante’s design by an addition of an external structure covering the dome, an exact copy of a medieval gallery from San Lorenzo Maggiore.
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Leonardo in Milan
Also Leonardo da Vinci could not remain indifferent to the refined culture he found in Milan. Leonardo’s passion for the observation of natural world and his continues research of perceivable data found in Milan a fertile ground where to flourish. The local tradition was strongly inspired by the Aristotelian culture based on the direct observation of the physical world. Thanks to this encounter, Leonardo slowly starts to become Milanese. His interest in human feelings and the “intentions of men’s souls”, the biggest revolution introduced by Leonardo’s Last Supper, could arise only from our city, where it was nourished by a centuries-long tradition.
In Milan, Leonardo understood that the Neoplatonic perfection, promoted by the Florentine circles gathered around the Medici family, according to which the universe was ordered following rational rules, did not represent the complex reality of the Creation. A perfect composition in perspective, invented in Florence, had to be modified according to the results of an attentive anatomic study of the human eye. The construction lines deform, points of view are multiplied like in a Flemish painting, and the composition is enriched by the optical corrections.
Finally, in the detailed studies of plants and flowers prepared by Leonardo for the Sala delle Asse, as well as in his Leda, we see some gothic details borrowed from Pisanello, Michelino da Besozzo or from Giovannino De Grassi’s illuminations. These drawing belong to the culture that unites Flanders with Tuscany, passes through the Valley of Po and Burgundy. The paths of art follow the major commercial routes of Europe.
What definitely sanctions this “milanisation” of Leonardo da Vinci is the comparison of Lombard terms in the artist’s manuscripts, which testify an assimilation of our culture. Leonardo da Vinci returned to Florence in the first years of 1500, after almost 20 years passed in Milan. He was already deeply changed, his art evolved in a revolutionary manner.
The cultural difference between young Michelangelo and the old master, Leonardo, violently appears in the scenes of the two battles that were supposed to be painted in the Council Hall, the Hall of the Five Hundred, in Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. If Michelangelo seeks inspiration in the “Classical” Tuscan culture, strongly influenced also by the gothic style popular in this region, Leonardo’s Battle of Anghiari breaks violently with this cultural world.
We are left with an impetuous vortex, a brutal fight between protagonists overwhelmed by the “bestial folly” of war, as Leonardo described it himself. Here, the intentions of the soul seem to drag humans into a disaster, the world does not follow any more any divine order but becomes a battle field of this terrible struggle. All these novelties will influence also Michelangelo, an intelligent and sensible artist.
Leonardo’s mature genius opens new routes, new possibilities for art, which would be explored in the following centuries. There would not be a Caravaggio, without the great lesson of a “Milanese” Leonardo da Vinci. But here another story begins…
text by Giacomo Zavatteri
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