Description
The Church of Santa Maria presso San Satiro is a small Renaissance church in the center of Milan, famous for a master's trick: Donato Bramante's false choir, a perspective painted and modeled in terracotta that looks almost ten meters deep and is in fact barely 97 centimeters deep.
The problem was space. Behind the transept ran a street, the contrada del Falcone, and the choir did not fit. So Bramante modeled it with terracotta reliefs and moldings, then painted, feigning an arm 9.7 meters deep. The church thus has a tau-shaped plan, a cross without the upper arm, completed by the illusion.
For the rest the interior is a small Renaissance jewel: three aisles with cross-shaped pillars, a hemispherical dome with gold and blue coffers, roundels with the Evangelists. From the right flank you enter the octagonal Bramantesque sacristy, with putti and terracotta heads by Agostino Fonduli.
In the left transept is the Sacellum of San Satiro, also called the Chapel of the Pietà, the oldest core, founded in the 9th century by Bishop Ansperto. Inside is Fonduli's Pietà, fourteen figures in painted terracotta around the dying Christ in Mary's arms.
Outside, the exposed-brick bell tower is the only exterior part not reworked over the centuries. The facade on the street is instead a 19th-century addition, from 1871, by Giuseppe Vandoni, in Neo-Renaissance forms. The one designed by Bramante is behind, on Via Falcone, and corresponds to the bulge of the false choir.
It all began with a miracle. According to tradition, in 1242 a young man struck an image of the Madonna and Child with a knife, and it began to bleed. Two centuries later, Duke Gian Galeazzo Sforza and his mother Bona of Savoy decided to give it a worthy church, and work began in 1478.
The new church incorporated the ancient sacellum of San Satiro. Bramante was hired between 1480 and 1482, when the walls were already largely raised. Then, with the Counter-Reformation, the church lost importance, and for centuries the facade stayed unfinished.
The problem was space. Behind the transept ran a street, the contrada del Falcone, and the choir did not fit. So Bramante modeled it with terracotta reliefs and moldings, then painted, feigning an arm 9.7 meters deep. The church thus has a tau-shaped plan, a cross without the upper arm, completed by the illusion.
For the rest the interior is a small Renaissance jewel: three aisles with cross-shaped pillars, a hemispherical dome with gold and blue coffers, roundels with the Evangelists. From the right flank you enter the octagonal Bramantesque sacristy, with putti and terracotta heads by Agostino Fonduli.
In the left transept is the Sacellum of San Satiro, also called the Chapel of the Pietà, the oldest core, founded in the 9th century by Bishop Ansperto. Inside is Fonduli's Pietà, fourteen figures in painted terracotta around the dying Christ in Mary's arms.
Outside, the exposed-brick bell tower is the only exterior part not reworked over the centuries. The facade on the street is instead a 19th-century addition, from 1871, by Giuseppe Vandoni, in Neo-Renaissance forms. The one designed by Bramante is behind, on Via Falcone, and corresponds to the bulge of the false choir.
It all began with a miracle. According to tradition, in 1242 a young man struck an image of the Madonna and Child with a knife, and it began to bleed. Two centuries later, Duke Gian Galeazzo Sforza and his mother Bona of Savoy decided to give it a worthy church, and work began in 1478.
The new church incorporated the ancient sacellum of San Satiro. Bramante was hired between 1480 and 1482, when the walls were already largely raised. Then, with the Counter-Reformation, the church lost importance, and for centuries the facade stayed unfinished.