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 laid
out by Napoleon in self-tribute. He had a vision of a grand new
centre for the Italian capital, laid 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 push 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 Madonna 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.