Opposite the Palace of Justice, where lawyers and defendants pass every morning, stands a fifteenth-century brick church almost nobody looks at: the Portinari brothers had it built in the sixties of that century, the Florentine bankers who ran the Milan branch of the Medici Bank and who also paid for the Portinari chapel at Sant'Eustorgio. The design is by Guiniforte Solari, who in the same years was raising Santa Maria delle Grazie and the Ospedale Maggiore, and the likeness to the Grazie is immediately visible. In 1943 the bombs destroyed all the chapels of the right aisle and the convent next door: what you see today is the surviving half.
What to see
The Grifi chapel, at the end of the left aisle, frescoed by Bernardino Butinone and Bernardo Zenale between 1489 and 1493 with the stories of Saint Ambrose: it is one of the finest cycles of the Lombard fifteenth century, with painted architecture in perspective, horses, battles and the scene in which the saint drives out the Arians. In the seventeenth century it was plastered over and rediscovered only in the nineteenth; the bombs did not touch it.
Then the architecture: three aisles divided by granite columns with Corinthian capitals, unusual in Milan where clustered Gothic piers were used, and pointed cross vaults; it is the exact moment when the Florentine Renaissance enters a Lombard church. The other surviving chapels have frescoes by Montorfano, Aurelio Luini and the school of Bergognone; the terracotta façade, with its oculi and single-light windows, is the restoration of 1912. In the convent next door, which was the Martinitt orphanage, there is now a high school, and the fifteenth-century cloister is in the schoolyard.
Visiting
The church is on Corso di Porta Vittoria, in front of the Palace of Justice, ten minutes from the Duomo, San Babila metro or tram; free entry with church hours and a lunch closure, and on weekdays it is almost always open. Twenty minutes. The Grifi chapel has a coin-operated light: use it.
Our editors' tip
Go straight to the Grifi chapel and look, in the battle scene, for the horses seen in foreshortening: Butinone and Zenale painted them ten years before Leonardo arrived in Milan, and nobody remembers it. Then go out and look at the church from Corso di Porta Vittoria: a fifteenth-century building among the courthouse blocks is the best photograph of how Milan treats its past.
