Stories from the Old Testament

The three absidal stained-glass windows are the oldest and largest in the Cathedral. They are dedicated the stories from Saint John's Book of Revelation, the Old Testament, and the New Testament.

The three windows were almost completely remade between 1833 and 1865 by Giovanni Battista Bertini and his sons Pompeo and Giuseppe, the director of Brera Academy at the time.

Several of the surviving panels of this window have a Late Renaissance and Mannerist style, corresponding with the arrival in Milan of the German master glassmaker Corrado de Mochis.

In the same years, is widely documented the supply from Giuseppe Arcimboldi (1551–57) of several cartoons for the panels of the Old Testament stained-glass window.

Despite this, it is undoubtedly the overall greatness of the artwork that brings together an exceptional iconographic collection related to stories from the Old Testament.

Every panel tells a story.

Various sections depicting episodes from the Old Testament, now on exhibition at the Duomo Museum, were originally created for the absidal stained-glass window.

These panels, clearly remade or reassembled with fragments that did not belong to, were not included in the many reorganizations of the Cathedral's corpus vitrearum.