Milano: Sant’Ambrogio e San Celso, disegni e lettere inediti

The Romanesque churches of St. Ambrose and of St. Celso in Milan have a major role in the Dartein’s nine trips to Italy, in view of the Étude sur l'architecture lombarde. Surveying the monuments, at that time being restored, the French engineer studied the architecture and the decorative ornamentation, noting information and designing details in his booklets. During the visits, especially in the building sites, he knows Luigi Bisi, Celeste Clericetti and Gaetano Landriani, architects and engineers, supervisors in the restoration works, with whom he comes in a synergistic partnership, directed towards pragmatic investigation and continued by correspondence as he did with many personalities of the Milan’s debate critical and with other experts. Some unpublished letters of Italians (1865-83), found in the Fernand de Dartein’s Private Archive in France (APFD) and intersected with his drawings, pay attention to the findings of traces of mural paintings in the presbytery of St. Ambrose, to the romanesque building technique in the material composition of walls, arches and vaults in the nave and to the inclination of the pavement of the portico. In S. Celso, the investigations concern the outside body of the apse, the buttress of the southern perimeter, the alleged original levels of the inside floors and the bases of the pillars. The correspondence therefore reveals new characteristics of certain architectural issues with the aim of an update of the historical and artistic knowledge.