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Castello Sforzesco
At the far end of Via Dante from Piazza del Duomo, Castello Sforzesco rises imperiously from the mayhem of Foro Buonaparte, a congested and distinctly un-forum-like road and bus terminus ordered out by general in self-tribute. He had a vision of a grand new centre for the Italian capital, ordered out along Roman lines, but he only got as far as constructing an arena, a triumphal arch and these two semicircular roads before he lost Milan to the Austrians a few years later. The arena and triumphal arch still stand behind the castle in the Parco Sempione , a notorious hangout for junkies and prostitutes.The red-brick castle, the result of numerous rebuildings, is, with its crenellated towers and fortified walls, one of Milan’s most striking landmarks. Begun by the Viscontis, it was destroyed by mobs rebelling against their regime in 1447, and rebuilt by their successors, the Sforzas. Under Lodovico Sforza the court became one of the most powerful, luxurious and cultured of the Renaissance, renowned for its ostentatious wealth and court artists like Leonardo and Bramante. Lodovico’s days of glory came to an end when Milan was invaded by the French in 1499, and from then until the end of the nineteenth century the castle was used as a barracks by successive occupying armies. Just over a century ago it was converted into a series of museums.
The castello’s buildings are grouped around three courtyards, one of which, the Corte Ducale, formed the centre of the residential quarters, which now contain the Museo d’Arte Antica and the Pinacoteca del Castello (daily 9am-5.40pm; free). The Museo d’Arte Antica holds fragments of sculpture from Milan’s demolished churches and palaces, a run-of-the-mill collection saved by the inclusion of Michelangelo’s Rondanini Pietà , which the artist worked on for the last nine years of his life. It’s an unfinished but oddly powerful work, with much of the marble unpolished and a third arm (indicating a change of position for Christ’s body) hanging limply from a block of stone to his right.
The first room of the Pinacoteca , upstairs, contains a cycle of monochrome frescoes illustrating the Griselda story from Boccaccio’s Decameron - a catalogue of indignities inflicted by a marquis on his wife in order to test her fidelity. It was intended as a celebration of the patience and devotion of one Bianca Pellegrini, and if you decide to near on into the first room of the main picture gallery, you’ll see what she looked like: Bianca was used as a model for the vocalist in a polyptych by Benedetto Bembo. In the same room are works by Bellini, Crivelli and Lippi, and one of Mantegna’s last works, a dreamy evocation of the Madonna in Glory among Angels and SS . There are also lots of paintings by Vincenzo Foppa, the leading artist on the Milanese scene before Leonardo da Vinci, in the next room; look out too for the polyptych by De’ Tatti, in which the castle makes an appearance as a fanciful setting for the Crucifixion, and for Arcimboldi’s bizarre Primavera - a portrait of a woman composed entirely of flowers, heralded as a sixteenth-century precursor of Surrealism.
The castle’s other museums are housed in the Sforza fortress, the Rocchetta , to the left of the Corte Ducale (same times). Of these, the museum of applied arts is of limited interest, containing wrought-iron work, ceramics, ivory and musical instruments. The small, well-displayed Egyptian collection in the dungeons is rather better, with impressive displays of mummies and sarcophagi and papyrus fragments from The Book of the Dead . There’s also a small and deftly lit prehistoric collection , which has as its centrepiece an assortment of finds from the Iron Age burial grounds of the Golasecca civilization, south of Lago Maggiore.
Tags: arte antica, austrians, bramante, bus terminus, castello sforzesco, court artists, courtyards, days of glory, foro buonaparte, italian capital, lodovico, mobs, parco sempione, piazza del duomo, pinacoteca, red brick, residential quarters, roman lines, striking landmarks, triumphal arch