Renaissance in Lombardy
The Italian Renaissance in Lombardy, in the Duchy of Milan in the mid-15th century, started in the International Lombard Gothic period and gave way to Lombard humanism with the passage of power between the Visconti and Sforza families. In the second half of the 15th century the Lombard artistic scene developed without disruption, with influences gradually linked to Florentine, Ferrarese, and Paduan styles. With the arrival of Bramante and Leonardo da Vinci, Milan reached absolute artistic heights in the Italian and European panorama, while still demonstrating the possibilities of coexistence between the artistic avant-garde and the Gothic substratum.
The Visconti
In the first half of the 15th century, Lombardy was the Italian region where the International Gothic style had the greatest following, so much so that in Europe the expression ouvrage de Lombardie was synonymous with an object of precious workmanship, referring especially to the miniatures and jewelry that were an expression of an elitist, courtly taste.After the marriage of Galeazzo II Visconti to Bianca of Savoy, sister of Amadeus VI of Savoy, French and English chivalric culture spread in Lombardy. The marriage of their children to members of the English and French royal families left a mark on the ideology and culture of the court. The great Visconti Castle, built by Galeazzo II in Pavia, was furnished in the style of a French castle, despite being an imposing fortified building. Gian Galeazzo Visconti, who succeeded him, built the great Carthusian monastery in Pavia that was to contain his mausoleum. The court spirit also prevails in the monks' cells converted into small houses of "courtiers" with loggias.File:Cortile_Interno_castello.jpg|link=https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cortile_Interno_castello.jpg|left|thumb|Courtyard of the Visconti Castle of Pavia
However, contacts with the Tuscan and Flanders artistic avant-gardes were quite frequent, due to the particularly well-articulated network of commercial and dynastic relations. French, Burgundian, German, and Italian craftsmen worked on the construction site of Milan Cathedral, which began in 1386, developing an international style, especially in the school of sculpture, which was indispensable for the realization of the cathedral's impressive decorative set. As early as around 1435 Masolino was working in Castiglione Olona, near Varese, showing innovations in the use of perspective, attenuated, however, by an attention to local figurative culture that made the new style more comprehensible and assimilable.
Francesco Sforza (1450–1466)
After the utopian attempt to revive the communal institutions on the death of Filippo Maria Visconti with the Ambrosian Republic, the transfer of power to the Sforzas, with Francesco, husband of Bianca Maria Visconti, had almost the appearance of a legitimate succession, with no clear ruptures from the past.In the field of art as well, Francesco's taste, and to a large extent that of his descendants, was aligned with the sumptuous, ornate and pompously celebratory taste of the Visconti: many "Visconti" artists were commissioned, such as Bonifacio Bembo. Nevertheless, the alliance with Florence and repeated contacts with Padua and Ferrara favored a penetration of the Renaissance style, especially through the exchange of miniaturists.
Architecture
To consolidate his power, Francesco immediately began the reconstruction of the castle of Porta Giovia, the Visconti's Milanese residence. In architecture, however, the most significant undertaking remained the Cathedral, while the Solari's buildings still looked towards the Gothic or even Lombard Romanesque tradition.In addition, to emphasize his legitimacy and piety, Francesco Sforza had a new cloister built in the Certosa di Pavia and confirmed all the privileges granted by his predecessors to the monastery, thus exploiting the Certosa as a link between the old Visconti dynasty and the Sforza lineage.
Filarete
The stay of Filarete, beginning in 1451, was the first significant Renaissance presence in Milan. The artist, recommended by Piero de' Medici, was given important commissions, due to his hybrid style that won over the Sforza court. He was a proponent of sharp lines, but he did not dislike a certain decorative richness, nor did he apply Brunelleschi's "grammar of orders" with extreme rigor. He was entrusted with the construction of the Castle Tower, Bergamo Cathedral, and the Ospedale Maggiore.In the latter work in particular, linked to a desire of the new prince to promote his own image, one can see the inequalities between the rigor of the basic design, set to a functional division of space and a regular plan, and the lack of integration with the surrounding building fabric, due to the oversized building. The Hospital's floor plan is rectangular, a central courtyard dividing it into two zones each traversed by two inner orthogonal arms that form eight vast courtyards. The same plan would later be taken up in the same years by similar buildings in Lombardy, such as the San Matteo Hospital in Pavia. The rhythmic purity of the succession of round arches of the courtyards, derived from Brunelleschi's teachings, is counterbalanced by an exuberance of the terracotta decorations.
Portinari Chapel
The arrival of more mature Renaissance formulations in the city is linked to commissions from Pigello Portinari, the Medici's agent for their banking branch in Milan. In addition to the construction of an office of the Banco Mediceo, now lost, Pigello had a family funeral chapel built in Sant'Eustorgio that bears his name, the Portinari Chapel, where the relic of the head of St. Peter Martyr was also located.The structure is inspired by Brunelleschi's Sagrestia Vecchia in San Lorenzo in Florence, with a square room equipped with a scarsella and covered by a dome with sixteen ribbed segments. Some details in the decoration are also inspired by the Florentine model, such as the frieze of cherubs or the roundels in the spandrels of the dome, but others depart from it, marking a Lombard origin. These are the tiburium protecting the dome, the terracotta decoration, the presence of pointed biforas, and the general decorative exuberance. The interior in particular departs from the Florentine model in the vibrant richness of its decorations, such as the rich imbrication of the dome in sloping hues, the frieze with angels on the drum, and the numerous frescoes by Vincenzo Foppa in the upper part of the walls.
Urban planning
Research in town planning under Francesco Sforza did not result in major concrete interventions, but it nevertheless produced a singular project of an ideal city, Sforzinda, the first to be fully theorized. The city was described by Filarete in the Treatise on Architecture and is characterized by an intellectual abstraction that prescinds from the earlier scattered indications of a more practical and empirical approach described by Leon Battista Alberti and other architects, especially in the context of the Urbino Renaissance. The city had a stellar plan, linked to cosmic symbols, and included aggregated buildings without organicity or internal logic, so much so that they were not even linked by a road network, which was instead set to a perfectly radial pattern.Painting
One of the most remarkable pictorial undertakings of Francesco Sforza's lordship is precisely related to the Portinari Chapel, frescoed in the upper parts of the walls by Vincenzo Foppa between 1464 and 1468. The decoration, which is in an excellent state of preservation, includes four roundels with Doctors of the Church in the pendentives, eight Busts of Saints in the oculi at the base of the dome, four Stories of St. Peter Martyr in the side walls, and two large frescoes in the triumphal arch and the arch of the counterfacade, respectively an Annunciation and an Assumption of the Virgin.The painter particularly cared for the relationship with the architecture, seeking an illusive integration between real and painted space. The four scenes of stories of the saint have a common vanishing point, placed outside the scenes on a horizon that falls at the eye level of the characters. It departs, however, from classical geometric perspective for its original atmospheric sensibility, which softens contours and geometric rigidity: it is the light that makes the scene humanly real. Moreover, a predilection for a simple but effective and comprehensible narrative prevails, set in realistic places with characters resembling everyday types, in line with the Dominicans' preference for didactic narrative.File:Vincenzo_foppa,_pala_bottigella.jpg|link=https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vincenzo_foppa,_pala_bottigella.jpg|thumb|Vincenzo Foppa, Pala Bottigella, Pavia, Pinacoteca Malaspina.
In his later works Foppa also used the medium of perspective in a flexible manner that was in any case secondary to other elements. An example of this is the Pala Bottigella, with a spatial layout derived from Bramante, but saturated with figures, where the accents are placed on the human representation of the various types and on the refraction of light on the various materials. This attention to optical truth, devoid of intellectualism, was one of the most typical features of later Lombard painting, also studied by Leonardo da Vinci.
Galeazzo Maria Sforza (1466–1476)
was undoubtedly attracted to Gothic-style sumptuousness, and his commissions seemed driven by a desire to do a lot and do it quickly, so his interests did not include encouraging original and up-to-date figurative production, finding it easier to draw from the past. To meet the many demands of the court, large and heterogeneous groups of artists were often formed, such as those who decorated the ducal chapel in the Castello Sforzesco, led by Bonifacio Bembo. In those frescoes, datable to 1473, despite some sober hints at figurative novelties, an archaic gilded pastiglia background still remains. This feature is also present in the cycle of frescoes commissioned by Galeazzo Maria Sforza, again to the same group of artists led by Bonifacio Bembo, for the Visconti Castle, and in particular in the Blue Room, where the decoration consists of panels with raised frames in gilded pastiglia.The artists who worked for Galeazzo Maria Sforza were never "interlocutors" with the patron, but rather docile executors of his wishes.