CHAPTER XII

_San Lorenzo. Romanesque Buildings_

“Gloriose sacris micat ornata Ecclesiis Ex quibus alma est Laurenti....”

In the Via Ticinese, just within the twelfth century boundary of the city, there stands a magnificent row of Corinthian columns, the only vestige above ground, in its original position, of the imperial Milan, whose splendours were sung by Ausonius. The Roman building of which they formed probably the peristyle, has long vanished, but the place where it must have stood is now occupied by San Lorenzo, the most ancient existing church in Milan, though much restored and altered, especially in the sixteenth century. The large impressive interior, octagonal in form, and surrounded by a wide ambulatory with a gallery above, which opens into the body of the church through four double storied arcades, recalls the style of San Vitale at Ravenna. Recent studies favour the theory that it was built in this form, as a church, in the sixth century, rather than the old idea that it was originally the great hall of Maximian’s Baths, and was converted to a Christian temple by St. Ambrose. However that may be, its form carries us back to a time which no other building in Milan commemorates, when the Roman Empire still lived, and the Church had but lately issued from its martyr struggles, and was still linked in its architecture with the old world.

San Lorenzo has unfortunately preserved none of those splendours celebrated by historian and poet in the eighth century. Arnolfo the chronicler weeps over the destruction of its roofs of mosaic and gold and starry gems, its paintings and sculptured marbles, in the calamitous fire of 1071. _Oh Temple, which had not your like in the world_, he cries. Restored after the fire, it was again grievously damaged by fire in 1124, and again restored. The fall of a great part of the roof in 1573 gave Cardinal Borromeo and his favourite Pellegrini an opportunity for interference. Pellegrini was succeeded in the work of restoration by his pupil, Martino Bassi. The result of their labours was the present lofty cupola, supported on great pilasters between the openings into the ambulatory, and the heavy architectural decoration of neo-classic style, which impose upon the old building, bare now of the rich and glowing colour of its original design, a cold, austere and melancholy character.

Fragments of antique capitals used upside down as bases of columns here and there, some columns of African marble in the chapel of St. Ippolito behind the High Altar, and a beautiful marble doorway with decoration of pagan character in low relief, at the entrance to the chapel of St. Aquilino, show that the church is partly composed out of the wreckage of the Roman city. The chapel last named, which opens off the ambulatory on the south, is of the sixth century, and has kept its ancient form. It is octagonal like the church, and is roofed with a shallow cupola. The circle of deep apertures high up, by which it is lighted, form outside those round-headed niches so familiar in later Lombard buildings. The Empress Galla Placidia is supposed to have founded this chapel, and to have intended to be buried there. A Christian sarcophagus, of late Roman workmanship, stands in a niche on the right hand of the entrance. But Galla Placidia lies in her gorgeous mausoleum at Ravenna. This sepulchre is said, however, to enclose the remains of her first husband, Athanulph, King of the Goths. Some mosaics in lunettes on either side of the apse date from the early days of the chapel—Christ with the Apostles, and the Shepherds feeding their Flocks. The sixteenth century tomb of St. Aquilino occupies the apse, which is decorated with frescoes of the Luinesque school.

There is little else of interest in the church. In the ambulatory is a tomb of 1411, and above it a much restored painting of Madonna with SS. Stephen and Ambrose presenting to her members of the Robbiano family, and in the chapel of St. Ippolito, a tomb with the effigy of Antonio Conte, a priest of the church, who died in 1349, and the late fifteenth century monument of another of the same family, Giovanni Conte, who restored the chapel.

The façade is of ornate late classic style, and the unfinished building on either side of the court in front was designed by Ricchini, a seventeenth century architect. An interesting view of the exterior, from the Piazza Vetra, on the north-east side, shows the enormous dome rising with incongruous effect, above the brick mass of the building, between four low towers of Lombard style, which survive from the eleventh or twelfth century reconstruction of the church after the great fires.

The archway and towers in the main street just beyond San Lorenzo represent the old Porta Ticinese, built by the Milanese consuls in 1171, and restored by Azzo Visconte in the fourteenth century. The structure was newly restored in 1858. Upon the outer side of the arch there is a sculpture of Madonna enthroned with the Child, and St. Ambrose presenting to her a model of the city, with SS. Lorenzo, Eustorgio and Peter Martyr, standing around. Similar groups, now in the Museo Archeologico, were placed upon Porta Romana and Porta Orientale by Azzo. They are the work apparently of the Campionese followers of Giovanni di Balduccio of Pisa.

[Illustration: THE OLD PORTA TICINESE.]

The Porta Ticinese corresponds to the original gate of the same name in the old circuit of the Roman walls, which stood nearer into the centre of the city at a spot now called _Carobbio_, a corruption of Quadrivium, the Four Ways. The modern gate is some little distance further south. This is the way out of the city to Pavia, the ancient Ticinum, hence the name Via Ticinese. Throughout the Middle Ages, from the time when Pavia was a royal seat, this street was the scene of all the state entries of conquering kings, or princely visitors. Barbarossa came this way, passing in majesty over the flattened earthworks and prone gates of the humiliated city. Three centuries later, the victorious soldier of fortune, Francesco Sforza, made his state entry by Porta Ticinese, appearing with his wife, Bianca Maria, and his young son, Galeazzo, upon a triumphal car beneath a canopy of cloth of gold, followed by the captains and chosen men of his army. Less than fifty years after, the destroyer of the brief Sforza domination, Louis XII., passed up in unparalleled splendour, wearing the ducal cap of Milan, having been presented by the Constable of the Gate with the keys of Porta Ticinese on the bridge over the canal immediately outside. He was preceded by all the clergy in pontifical array, and by a gorgeous procession of pages, musicians, men-at-arms, and courtiers. Immediately before him rode Gian Giacomo Trivulzio, the golden staff of a Marshal of France in his hand, and in the throng of cardinals and ambassadors who followed, the most conspicuous was that warlike ecclesiastic, known then as S. Pietro in Vincula, who, as Julius II., a few years later became