Cappella Portinari

Behind the apse of Sant'Eustorgio hides the most Florentine room in Milan: a domed funerary chapel built in the 1460s for the manager of the Medici bank, painted by Vincenzo Foppa and housing the marble ark of a martyred saint. It is a major work of the Lombard Renaissance, associated with the basilica's museum.

Why it matters

The chapel was conceived around 1462 by Pigello Portinari (1421-1468), the Florentine banker who directed the Milan branch of the Medicean bank from 1452, as the parish account recounts: a chapel dedicated to Saint Peter Martyr, destined to hold the relic of the Dominican martyr's head and to serve as the family burial place. Work was certainly finished by 1468, the year Pigello himself was buried there. The commission's architecture — a square room crowned by a drum, dome and lantern, derived from Florentine models — planted the vocabulary of the Tuscan renaissance in Lombardy for the first time on this scale. Around it, Vincenzo Foppa painted one of the great fresco cycles of the fifteenth century, and in the centre stands the ark of Saint Peter Martyr by Giovanni di Balduccio, a fourteenth-century marble monument of rare richness.

What to notice

The upper drum features the drum where twenty terracotta angels in high relief dance in a circle, alternating frontal, three-quarter and profile views, and the dome's pendentives with the four Doctors of the Church — Gregory, Jerome, Ambrose and Augustine — beneath painted heraldic shields of the Portinari family. Foppa's cycle on the walls narrates the life of Peter of Verona as preacher, exorcist, wonder-worker and martyr: the miracle of the cloud, the miracle of the false Madonna, the healing of the wounded foot, and the martyrdom itself. The crowd in the false Madonna scene includes — the profiled figure behind the saint is identified as Pigello Portinari's portrait. In the back wall of the scarsella hangs a fifteenth-century panel, attributed to Giovanni da Vaprio or a master of Benedetto Bembo's circle, showing the legendary apparition in which the martyr commanded the Florentine banker to raise his chapel. The ark at the centre, commissioned from Giovanni di Balduccio around 1336 with funding from Azzone Visconti, is carved in Carrara marble on red Verona marble pillars, with eight Virtue figures, narrative reliefs and ranks of angelic sculptures; it was moved into the chapel in 1736 and set at its centre during the nineteenth-century restorations.

Context and history

For centuries the architecture was attributed to Tuscan masters; recent scholarship instead favors a Lombard architect working to the client's Florentine brief, a debate that mirrors the chapel's role between two artistic cultures. Foppa's frescoes themselves were lost from view until their rediscovery in 1868 during works on the basilica; the restorations of 1871-73 brought them back, and the attribution to Foppa, first proposed then, was definitively confirmed by twentieth-century studies. Recovery was not gentle: the campaign of 1874-75 opened the two doors flanking the chapel, and the terracotta angels with much of the painted surface were repainted with the interpretive freedom of the age, so part of the room's brilliance is itself nineteenth-century. The chapel forms part of Sant'Eustorgio's museum complex, alongside the necropolis, chapter house and sacristy.