Girolamo Rainaldi for the Duomo of Milan: the Façade Project of 1642 and some Clarifications on the Graphic Corpus of the Architect

Abstract

Our knowledge about the activity of Girolamo Rainaldi (1570-1655) in northernItaly, and particularly inMilan, has recently been enriched with data coming from previously unpublished documents. From those, we discover that the architect was active in theLombardcity for the long-running question of the conclusion of Duomo’s façade, for which a project dating to circa 1607 is preserved in the Ambrosiana Library.

Now the discovery of a presentation drawing with a proposal for the façade of the same church, dated and signed in 1642, preserved in a private collection, allows a further contribution to the information on Rainaldi's activity in Milan where he claims to be at the time of execution of the drawing. In 1642 the bishop ofMilanwas Cardinal Cesare Monti, for whom, in the same year, Girolamo had presented a project for the transformation of a suburban building into the family residence.

In the occasion of this design for the façade of the largest Lombardchurch, we appreciate how Girolamo is dealing with a pre-existing building. His "hybridizing" approach already expressed in the drawing for the same church of 1607 and in the well-known foglio with the proposal for the façade of the Basilica of San Petronio in Bologna from the 1620s, gets confirmed in the project discussed in this study, albeit less explicitly.

At the same time, this study permits reaching some clarifications on Rainaldi's graphic corpus which confirm the attributions previously made by the author and resolves some historiographical issues on the architect's activity during his long career.