Milan Cathedral

← Encyclopedia

Milan Cathedral — the Duomo di Milano — is the cathedral church of Milan, a vast Gothic structure begun in 1386 and not formally completed until the twentieth century, dedicated to the Nativity of the Virgin Mary. It is the seat of the Archbishop of Milan and among the largest churches in the world, its roofline a forest of pinnacles and statues in white-pink marble quarried at Candoglia and floated down the canals the project itself helped dig.

The building belongs to history before it belongs to any hidden meaning. Its construction spanned the rule of the Visconti and the Sforza, the French and Spanish occupations, and Napoleon, who was crowned King of Italy here in 1805 and pressed for the facade to be finished. The work drew architects and masons from across Europe, and the long argument over whether to build in the northern Gothic manner or the Italian one left its mark on every stage of the design. The gilded statue of the Virgin that crowns the highest spire, the Madonnina, was raised in 1774 and became the city’s emblem; by old custom no building in Milan was to rise above her.

As a cathedral it has been, for six centuries, a working instrument of Roman Catholic devotion — the daily office, the Mass, the requiem sung for the dead, the relics and the cult of the Virgin to whom it is given. Milan kept its own liturgy, the Ambrosian rite traced to Saint Ambrose, distinct from the Roman use observed elsewhere, and the cathedral remains its principal house. The treasury preserves a relic held to be a nail from the Crucifixion, lifted each year in a ceremony that descends from a wooden lift the period attributes, without firm evidence, to Leonardo da Vinci.

One feature carries a more exact significance. Set into the floor near the main entrance runs a brass meridian line, laid in the 1780s by the astronomers of the Brera Observatory: a hole in the south wall admits a beam of sunlight that crosses the line at local noon, marking the solstices and the date. It was a serious scientific instrument, used to regulate the city’s clocks, and it belongs to a family of cathedral meridians built across Catholic Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries — churches pressed into service as solar observatories. The cathedral thus holds two orders of timekeeping at once: the liturgical calendar overhead and the astronomical year traced in metal across its floor.

→ Related: Cosimo De Medici · Mass For The Dead · Beatification