From Palazzo Castiglioni in Milan to Italian Liberty.

The curator Andrea Speziali talks about Art Nouveau starting from Palazzo Castiglioni in Milan. Built by Giuseppe Sommaruga (1867-1917) in 1901-1904, it constitutes a bit the artistic "manifesto" of Art Nouveau in Milan. The building was built on three floors, with two facades, a main one on the street and a secondary one on the garden, plus the annexes detached from the main body and forming the stables and the shed.
This palace has a base with rough rustication that recalls the natural forms of the rock; the other decorations present are an eighteenth-century resumption of stucco.
It is currently the headquarters of the Milan Traders Union.

In 1900 the entrepreneur Ermengildo Castiglioni decided to have a palace built in Corso Venezia: in his intentions the building had to differentiate itself from all the others, which is why he commissioned the architect Giuseppe Sommaruga, known for various interesting solutions, to carry out the task.
This attitude of the client, almost a nobleman of the seventeenth century willing to show his greatness, is found in the building (particularly impressive if compared to the remaining Italian liberty) and in the desire to create a building of a rather new style for Italy (the liberty , in fact) in a context among the most "noble" of the city, almost in an attitude of defiance to the well-thought and conservative fellow citizens.
A challenge probably lost since, when the scaffolding was removed from the facade in 1903, public opinion sided strongly until two statues of female figures placed above the entrance Portal were removed. The two statues, by Ernesto Bazzaro, aroused scandal enough to publish satirical cartoons on the story of the Palazzo Castiglioni in the newspaper Guerin Meschino in the months following the inauguration (17-24-31 May and 11-14 June and 19 July). The female figures were incomprehensible in their symbolic meaning (in reality they well represented both peace and industry), secondly they were criticized because they did not have a specific role, they were not caryatids to support the Portal or a balcony, and lastly (but surely this was the main topic) they accused themselves of being too proximate and naked (the Milanese populace began to ironically define it the Cà di ciapp).
The two statues were thus removed and subsequently placed on the side of the villa Luigi Faccanoni in Milan. The Portal that remained devoid of these two imPortant elements had to be modified: it was raised occupying part of the upper window, which in the remaining part was buffered by a bas-relief: the final result was to remove strength from the central element of the building, or the Portal and the group of windows on the main floor above it, which is now of the same emphasis as the lateral service Portal, which is enriched on the upper part by a beautiful tripartite window. Palazzo Castiglioni, the first properly liberty building in the city even if, curiously or perhaps by provocation, stands right in the middle of Corso Venezia, a street of nobility already in the eighteenth century, characterized by the sober lines of Neoclassicism: the effect is therefore disruptive, for more than one reason. Monumental dimensions, severe facade and a wink to Michelangelo's nostalgia in the use of rustication and the profusion of high-relief putti constitute its most evident, but also more superficial features. More interesting is the mass as a whole, where each material contributes to giving sense of movement and a general impression of power, especially in the original portholes on the ground floor characterized by the free interweaving of wrought iron designed by the same architect. Some compositional choices are also innovative, actually criticized by contemporaries, such as narrow and high windows whose traditional frame is replaced by putti holding scrolls and the asymmetry of the facade, which has a single balcony at the top, on the right side. The internal organization of the spaces is also interesting, whose legibility, after the restoration of the seventies, is unfortunately compromised; however, the wonderful staircase entwined by the metal ribbons of a floral railing and flanked by the shiny, and slightly funeral, black labradorite columns remains.

Behind Palazzo Castiglioni, on via Marina, there is an elegant red brick façade, with many windows arranged regularly, large glazed loggias, gentle wrought iron railings: this is the rear facade of the building itself, where Sommaruga forgets the monumentality in favor of measure and lightness. Palazzo Castiglioni is the true symbol of Milanese Liberty, with which every other style building has had to measure itself.
The staircase and the peacock room reflect the exuberance of decorative motifs inspired by nature, with the proliferation of leaves, animals, biomorphic forms rendered in the materials of stone and metal, the metamorphic and unstoppable growth of a world, the natural one precisely, that the Milanese bourgeoisie, with its industries, is attacking, but to which we do not give up, which we continue to look at, in a dream of pepetual integration, and in a context of infinite inspiration to it, to its strength and wealth.