the whole
realm. The completion of the facade and the internal decoration of the
great church and chapels was one of the objects that lay nearest to his
heart. A whole army of architects and sculptors, painters and builders
were employed under his orders; and so great was the store of precious
marbles, brought there from Carrara and other parts of Italy, that the
place was said to resemble a vast stone quarry. During the twenty years
that the Moro reigned as Regent and Duke in Milan, the new apse built in
Bramante's classical style, the central cupola, and the beautiful
cloisters with their slender marble shafts and dark red terra-cotta
friezes of angel-heads, all rose into being. Then Ambrogio Borgognone
decorated the roof of nave and apse, and designed the elaborate
_intarsiatura_ of these very choir-stalls to which Lodovico alludes in
his letter to Isabella d'Este. And then the same Lombard master painted
these frescoes and altar-pieces of grave saints and gentle Madonnas,
which still adorn the side chapels with their solemn forms and rich
golden harmonies. Many of these are ruined, others we know are gone. The
fragments of the noble banners with portraits of kneeling figures, which
the artist painted for processional use on solemn occasions are now in
our National Gallery. There, too, is that loveliest of all Perugino's
Madonnas, with the warrior Archangels at her side, and the perfect
landscape beyond, which the Umbrian master painted in the last years of
the century, by the Moro's express command, for his favourite sanctuary.

But the crowning work of Lodovico's days was the facade of the great
church which, after many different attempts, was finally begun in 1491,
and mostly executed during the next seven years. This magnificent
creation, the triumph of Lombard genius, was designed by a native
architect, Giovanni Antonio Amadeo, or Di Madeo, as he signs himself, a
peasant lad who had grown up in his father's farm close by, and whose
earliest independent work is said to have been a group of angels on the
marble doorway leading from the church into the cloisters. He had
afterwards been employed at Bergamo, where the Colleoni Chapel and the
effigy of the great Condottiere's young daughter, the sleeping virgin
Medea, still bear witness to his poetic invention and rare decorative
skill. One of Lodovico's first acts after his return to Milan had been
to recall Amadeo to Pavia, and in 1490, this gifted artist was appoin