Milan Cathedral Quotes

Beauty in the European sense has always had a premeditated quality to it. We've always had an aesthetic intention and a long-range plan. That's what enabled western man to spend decades building a Gothic cathedral or a Renaissance piazza. The beauty of New York rests on a completely different base. It's unintentional. It arose independent of human designt, like a stalagmitic cavern. Forms which in themselves quite ugly turn up fortuitously, without design, in such incredible surroundings that they sparkle with with a sudden wondrous poetry...Sabina was very much attracted by the alien quality of New York's beauty. Fran found it intriguing but frightening; it made him feel homesick for Europe.

A complicated structure? Undoubtedly. But after all, the cathedral of Milan is complicated too, and you still look at it with awe.

the cathedral-like Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan, which Mark Twain found so enchanting that he declared he would happily live in it for the rest of his life. It is still probably the most beautiful shopping center in the world.

MAIN CHARACTERS Cesare Borgia (c. 1475–1507). Italian warrior, illegitimate son of Pope Alexander VI, subject of Machiavelli’s The Prince, Leonardo employer. Donato Bramante (1444–1514). Architect, friend of Leonardo in Milan, worked on Milan Cathedral, Pavia Cathedral, and St. Peter’s in the Vatican. Caterina Lippi (c. 1436–1493). Orphaned peasant girl from near Vinci, mother of Leonardo; later married Antonio di Piero del Vaccha, known as Accattabriga. Charles d’Amboise (1473–1511). French governor of Milan from 1503 to 1511, Leonardo patron.

The pilgrimage of Italy, which I now accomplished, had long been the object of my curious devotion. The passage of Mount Cenis, the regular streets of Turin, the Gothic cathedral of Milan, the scenery of the Boromean Islands, the marble palaces of Genoa, the beauties of Florence, the wonders of Rome, the curiosities of Naples, the galleries of Bologna, the singular aspect of Venice, the amphitheatre of Verona, and the Palladian architecture of Vicenza, are still present to my imagination. I read the Tuscan writers on the banks of the Arno; but my conversation was with the dead rather than the living, and the whole college of Cardinals was of less value in my eyes than the transfiguration of Raphael, the Apollo of the Vatican, or the massy greatness of the Coliseum. It was at Rome, on the fifteenth of October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted fryars were singing Vespers in the temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the City first started to my mind. After Rome has kindled and satisfied the enthusiasm of the Classic pilgrim, his curiosity for all meaner objects insensibly subsides.

It was he who told her of the three inscriptions over the doors of the Milan Cathedral. One, with a carving of roses, says, “All that pleases is but for a moment”; another, with a carving of a cross, says, “All that grieves is but for a moment”; and over the great central door are only the words, “Nothing is important but that which is eternal.

Just how matchless is the Great Pyramid? Hutchings starts out by showing that it is:   ·         A building so large that all the locomotives in the world today could not pull its weight. ·         A building so large that it could hold the cathedrals of Rome, Florence, and Milan and still have room for the Empire State Building, Westminster Abbey, St. Paul’s Cathedral, and both houses of the British Parliament. ·         A building made up of two and one-half million blocks of stone ranging from three to sixty tons each. ·         A building that has not settled, has not shifted, has not budged even one-tenth of an inch in thousands of years—a feat that even modern engineering could not equal.[259]