Milan's cathedral is a curious construction. Its foundations were built in the 4th century and it was rebuilt several times, leaving us with a crazy mix of styles that used to offend many aesthetes.
Construction of the current version was begun in 1386 by Gian Galeazzo Visconti, who had recently succeeded his vicious uncle as the city's tyrant. From the beginning there was tension over whether to build the cathedral in the French gothic style or in something more Roman and Italian. Over the course of the cathedral's long history dozens of architects and sculptors have added their touches; the facade was not actually finished until 1805-1812, at the instigation of Napoleon.
And the amazing doors were not installed until the early 1900s.
The roof line, as you can see, is marvelously gothic.
But many details and much of the scupture can only be called Renaissance.
Famous 16th-century statue by Marco D'Agrate showing St. Bartholomew flayed
Critics disagree about the Cathedral. John Ruskin was harsh, writing that it
steals from every style in the world: and every style spoiled. The cathedral is a mixture of Perpendicular with Flamboyant, the latter being peculiarly barbarous and angular, owing to its being engrafted, not on a pure, but a very early penetrative Gothic … The rest of the architecture among which this curious Flamboyant is set is a Perpendicular with horizontal bars across: and with the most detestable crocketing, utterly vile. Not a ray of invention in a single form… Finally the statues all over are of the worst possible common stonemasons’ yard species, and look pinned on for show. The only redeeming character about the whole being the frequent use of the sharp gable ... which gives lightness, and the crowding of the spiry pinnacles into the sky.
Mark Twain, on the other hand, was a fan:
What a wonder it is! So grand, so solemn, so vast! And yet so delicate, so airy, so graceful! A very world of solid weight, and yet it seems ...a delusion of frostwork that might vanish with a breath!
Henry James also admired it:
A structure not supremely interesting, not logical, not … commandingly beautiful, but grandly curious and superbly rich. … If it had no other distinction it would still have that of impressive, immeasurable achievement … a supreme embodiment of vigorous effort.
These days we don't seem to have many aesthetes who get the heeby-jeebies from mixing styles, so the cathedral is much praised and beloved; most tourists don't seem to know or care that what that are looking at was built over such a long time, and they just find it marvelous.
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What a wonder it is! So grand, so solemn, so vast! And yet so delicate, so airy, so graceful! A very world of solid weight, and yet it seems ...a delusion of frostwork that might vanish with a breath!
While I have always adored Old Mr. Clemens, it is worth noting that this was written in 1867, when he was only 32 years old, on his first ever trip outside the United States.
In fact, I'm fairly sure it was his first ever trip east of the Mississippi river basin - he'd been down the river to New Orleans, up it to St. Louis and beyond, and all the way west out to San Francisco - but all of this in the 1850s and 60s, when New Orleans and St. Louis were still fairly rustic and undeveloped, despite their decent population sizes; and of course, San Francisco was still a frontier city.
In the American West and Center of his era, you simply didn't see many buildings made of stone - everything was wood and whitewash, with the occasional bit of brickwork thrown in. Probably the "grandest" sorts of buildings he'd ever seen at that point were the more impressive city halls of places like St. Louis, or the odd large and prosperous bank built out of marble. Certainly you didn't see many ornate cathedrals, dripping in sculptures and intricate carvings.
Clemens went on to become a fairly "cultured" fellow in his old age, but in 1867, he was still a young man with a deeply provincial world view - so I while I don't at all begrudge him his effusive praise for the cathedral in Milan, I do temper it with the thought that this was a man who had seen little of even America at that point, and nothing of Europe or the rest of the developed world, and to him, he was seeing something out of a fairy tale or a Romantic novel about chivalrie and kings.
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