Monastery of San Sigismondo

It seems that we can still perceive the presence of Bianca Maria Visconti as the protagonist, daughter of Filippo Maria who was the last of the Visconti to be Duke of Milan, and mother of Ludovico il Moro, the Sforza who of the Milanese Dukes would be the last in direct dynastic succession. They were not easy times – in 1515 Ludovico il Moro had to surrender to the French, and ten years later the French would also be driven out – but the kinship between the Visconti and Sforza families was one of the crucial junctures.

Bianca Maria had married Francesco Sforza in a chapel that was located right where the monastery and the church of San Sigismondo are today: it was to celebrate that wedding that the bride had wanted it built, in 1463. The remarkable pictorial and plastic decoration inside it, however, is the result of successive 16th century interventions, a unified work completed in a few decades by the major artists of Cremonese Mannerism. Pentecost, by Giulio Campi, stands out in the vault of the first span, and the altarpiece behind the high altar – which also depicts Bianca Maria and her offered consort, among other figures – while Bernardino Campi is responsible for Paradise in the dome, and Camillo Boccaccino for the frescoes in the presbytery.

The wooden stalls of the choir and the majestic organ case were added between the 16th and 17th centuries. The cloister of the adjacent monastery, however, is still that from the decades between the 15th and 16th centuries.