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In the church of the Monastero Maggiore at Milan, dedicated to San Maurizio, Lombard architecture and fresco-painting may be studied in this rare combination. The monastery itself, one of the oldest in Milan, formed a retreat for cloistered virgins following the rule of St. Benedict.
On the coffin lay his knightly sword, with a laurel crown, and the decorations of the Hungarian Order of St. Stephen, the Italian Order of San Maurizio, and the Brazilian Annunciata star. The pall-bearers were Hungarian counts, and on each side of the hearse walked the dignitaries of the city.
See also the Madonna, with Infant Christ, S. John, and a Lamb, at Lugano. Side chapel of S. Maurizio at Milan. These frescoes are, in my opinion, Luini's very best. The whole church is a wonderful monument of Lombard art. "Crucifixion" at Lugano. See, for example, the oil-paintings in the cathedral of Como, so fascinating in their details, so lame in composition. In the Brera.
Yet Bandello lived in Milan while the Church of S. Maurizio was being painted; nor does he show the slightest sign of disgust at the discord between the Contessa's life and her artistic presentation in the person of a royal martyr. In the Sculpture Gallery of the Brera is preserved a fair white marble tomb, carved by that excellent Lombard sculptor, Agostino Busti. The epitaph runs as follows:
Among them are several archivolt pieces, very much like those of the font of Calixtus at Cividale, which show by a mutilated inscription that they were due to Bishop Maurizio, apparently a bishop suspected of being on the side of the Franks, and therefore blinded by the Byzantines in 781.
He tells how he once saw a man from Porto Maurizio, pallid, with little hair on his face, and fat in person, who had in his breasts milk enough to suckle a child. He was a soldier, and this strange property caused him no slight inconvenience. Sages, he affirms, on account of their studious lives, are little prone to sexual passion.
But, in spite of every drawback, he could not sufficiently admire the buildings and the sites which bore witness of all that was grandest in human history. Along with a young relative, Christopher Tasso, he pursued his classical studies in the midst of all these stimulating associations under the tutorship of Maurizio Cattaneo, the most learned master in Italy.
Slowly, as he wended his way through the many turnings of the narrow calle to Campo San Maurizio, carrying a beautiful Moorish box filled with the pearly shells which the Venetians call "flowers of the Lido," and a bouquet of aromatic carnations for the bambino, he recalled the figure and speech of his Madonna, and they were not those of the maidens whom one might encounter at the traghetto or in the Piazza; there had been a dignity and self-forgetfulness in such perfect harmony with the face that, at the moment, this had seemed entirely natural.
Little conception of his charm can be formed by those who have not seen his frescoes in the Brera and S. Maurizio Maggiore at Milan, in the church of the Angeli at Lugano, or in the pilgrimage church of Saronno.
The altars of the inner and outer church are placed against the septum, back to back, with certain differences of structure that need not be described. Simple and severe, S. Maurizio owes its architectural beauty wholly and entirely to purity of line and perfection of proportion.
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