At the end of this century, artistic industry received an extraordinary impulse throughout the Visconte States from the splendid patronage of Gian Galeazzo. His vast new foundations, the Duomo of Milan, the Certosa of Pavia, his mighty engineering enterprises, gave endless employment to workers in stone. In this fervour of activity Lombard sculpture began to evolve clearly its special character, and agreeably to the gorgeous tastes of the Prince, which became a tradition for his successors, a love of excessive and exaggerated ornamentation appears, and marks it henceforth.
After Gian Galeazzo a lull came in art with the civic confusion of Gian Maria’s few years, and the continuous wars of Filippo Maria’s thirty-five. This period represents the pause between the mediæval era and the Renaissance in Milan. The building and decoration of the Cathedral was continued slowly by men whom the old principles no longer inspired, and the new had not yet reached. No great names occur in the host of craftsmen engaged in the work. The Campione fraternity was still represented, and continued to exist for a long time, though its traditions were dying out, and Jacopino da Tradate, who worked in the earlier half of the century, was a sculptor of some power.
The triumph of Francesco Sforza in 1450 began a new era of prosperity for Milanese art. A long peace, a succession of sovereigns in whom a policy of splendour was assisted by stupendous wealth and a genuine love of beauty and culture, the concourse of strangers of genius to their Court, bringing the inspiration of the great classic revival from Tuscany and Central Italy, roused the Lombards to an enthusiasm and activity which carried them to their highest pitch of achievement at the end of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Brunelleschi, employed by Filippo Maria to build a fortress, Antonio Averulino, known as Filarete, whom Francesco Sforza summoned to design the Ospedale Maggiore and to assist on the Castle, Michelozzo, builder of the beautiful Portinari Chapel, and finally the great Bramante, twelve years resident in the city in the Moro’s days, and Leonardo da Vinci himself, master of all the arts and sciences, were their guides in the new or rediscovered mysteries of architecture. Giuniforte Solari, and Pietro his son, architects of the Duomo, Certosa, and many of the churches and convents raised everywhere by Francesco and Bianca Maria in the ardour of their piety and the joy of their newly-won glory, show the transition from Gothic to the Renaissance style, slowly accomplished however, for the Lombards were tenacious of their local traditions and not ready to accept new ideas. Even in the next generation of builders, Amadeo, Dolcebuono, Cristoforo Solari, Briosco, and the rest, all nursed in the precepts imparted by the Tuscans, and fully inspired by the Renaissance spirit, there was still a lingering adhesion to certain Gothic predilections. The Lombard character, especially noticeable in a love of ornamentation, still expressed itself in the forms learnt from foreign example. In all that peculiarly graceful building in Milan of the later fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, which is called indiscriminately Bramantesque, and attributed to the influence of the Urbino master—cloisters and cortiles with elegant pillared porticos and sculptured capitals of rich and fanciful design, and archivolts and cornices decorated with terra-cotta mouldings, grand arched portals often decorated with classic heads—a Lombard character may almost always be detected.