If you live in a tiny apartment, interior designers suggest you use lots of mirrors so that rooms look bigger than they are. This is a relatively modern trick, probably not very much used in the Fifteenth Century: when San Satiro Church was built – which compared to other churches in Milan is a miserable studio apartment – there was the need for a good artifice that would make it look majestic in its own way. Luckily Italians are quite good at finding a way out of problems. In the past centuries we had become masters of a technique called trompe l’oeil, an optical illusion to put it simply. In the Thirteenth Century, just to make an example, an unrestrained Giotto enjoyed himself at tricking visitors of Cappella degli Scrovegni in Padova; after him, other more or less famous painters started to put such tricks in their decorations, but it wasn’t until the Fifteenth Century that someone decided to decorate a whole room with this technique.
Photo by Alice Gemignani
At that time Ludovico III Gonzaga, who wanted to pimp his residence in Mantova, called Mantegna and gave him carte blanche (or at least a wall). Good old Andrea doesn’t back up and starts painting crazy perspective that would open the ceiling directly to heaven and other funny details that opened, way back when, to magical portals on parallel worlds. This happened between 1460 and 1470. At the end of the century, Donato Bramante is asked to take on a job in Milan that his friends already said was a bummer. Indeed, he arrives and his buyers explain: “Look Donato, we want a church with a simple cross plan, but we had a limited budget so we had to cut down on something. So, well, there’s a missing part.” “What do you mean there’s a missing part?” worriedly asks Bramante. “Yes, the upper part is missing. The choir, you know, the one behind the altar?” “Darn, that’s like the most important part… What shall I do with it?” “Donà, you decide. Just do something.” This is what happened, more or less, and poor Bramante, after an initial bewilderment and (we hope) having renegotiated his fee, had an idea. “Ok, I got it. I will paint a perspective fresco, so if people are distracted they won’t notice that this church has a missing part”. This is the story of the false choir by Bramante, an incredible struggle which owed him international fame as one of the first 3D Masters.
Photo by Alice Gemignani
BASILICA DI SANTA MARIA PRESSO SAN SATIRO
Via Torino 17/19, Milano
☎︎ 02 874683
Metro M1 M3 Duomo
Tram 2, 3, 12, 14, 15, 16, 19 Duomo
Bus 54, 73 Duomo
