Interior of Milan Cathedral

This painting can be identified with the canvas commissioned in 1838 by Emperor Ferdinand I while in Milan for his coronation as King of Lombard-Veneto. The painting entered the Belvedere Gallery in Vienna but, following the financial setbacks experienced by the Habsburg monarchy, it had to be auctioned with a large group of Italian 19th-century works at the Galleria Scopinich, Milan, in 1928. The Milanese art world had hailed Bisi as the sole heir of Giovanni Migliara, the master from Alessandria, since his death in 1837, but it was the imperial commission of 1838 and the exhibition of the canvas at the Esposizione di Belle Arti di Brera in 1840 that set the official seal on Bisi’s success. The perspective view of the interior of Milan Cathedral was reproduced in an engraving in the Album of the exhibition that year, which was accompanied by a long entry describing the work’s extraordinary pictorial qualities, from the architecture depicted in the finest detail to the artist’s ability to render the variations in the light pouring into the interior through the stained-glass windows (executed by the Bertini brothers’ workshop). From 1830 on, Bisi had made various watercolour copies of Migliara’s works, but he rapidly moved on from the traditional scenographic approach to the subject and rendered it in a more lifelike way, perhaps also with the help of the illustrated catalogues of the most famous Italian and foreign monuments, which circulated widely in the 19th century. Ferdinand I probably commissioned the painting because he wished to own an accurate depiction of the city’s monument par excellence, which the artist showed in all its grandeur and solemnity. The result is a remarkably striking and spiritual image, created through the low viewpoint that accentuates the height of the vaulted ceilings, and the framing that gives the viewer the feeling of being near the main altar around which a small crowd of worshippers are gathered.