Milan Cathedral

Archbishop Antonio da Saluzzo began the new cathedral in 1386, the year the old campanile collapsed. The timing served his cousin Gian Galeazzo Visconti, who had just seized power from his uncle Bernabò: the project was framed as a reward to a population who had suffered under Bernabò, and as a way to assert Milan's standing while he kept his own court in Pavia. The old church of Santa Maria Maggiore was quarried for stone. The Fabbrica del Duomo, the works authority, ran 300 employees under first chief engineer Simone da Orsenigo, who planned a brick building in Lombard Gothic style; Gian Galeazzo granted it exclusive marble from the Candoglia quarry and exempted it from taxes. The French engineer Nicolas de Bonaventure, brought in from 1389, added Rayonnant Gothic elements.

Gian Galeazzo also wanted the cathedral centred on his father Galeazzo II's funeral monument, as a Visconti mausoleum; the Fabbrica and the Milanese public resisted, and the dispute pushed him to found a separate dynastic site at the Certosa di Pavia instead. He died in 1402 with the cathedral nearly half built, but work then stalled for lack of money until 1480, its notable work in that gap the tombs of Marco Carelli and Pope Martin V (1424) and the apse windows of the 1470s. The nave and aisles were finished to the sixth bay by 1452 under Francesco Sforza, and the octagonal cupola — after a 1488 competition that drew entries from Leonardo da Vinci and Bramante — was completed between 1500 and 1510 under Ludovico Sforza.

After Carlo Borromeo became archbishop, the cathedral's lay funerary monuments, including the Visconti tombs, were removed. In 1571 he appointed Pellegrino Pellegrini (Tibaldi) chief engineer, and pushed a Renaissance remodelling to subdue the building's Gothic character, by then seen as foreign. Pellegrini's design for the still-unbuilt façade — columns, obelisks and a large tympanum — prompted a public competition but was never built. The presbytery was rebuilt in 1575–1585 and the choir stalls finished by 1614; Borromeo consecrated the whole building as a single new church in 1577, replacing the separately-standing Santa Maria Maggiore and Santa Tecla, themselves only unified in 1549.

In 1649 chief architect Carlo Buzzi reversed Borromeo's Renaissance direction, returning the façade to Gothic form and folding the existing Renaissance details into giant Gothic pilasters and two belfries. The old Santa Maria Maggiore façade was demolished and the roof finished in 1682. In 1762 the Madonnina's spire was raised to 108.5 metres, topped by Giuseppe Perego's polychrome statue of the Madonnina. In 1805, with his coronation as King of Italy approaching, Napoleon Bonaparte ordered the façade finished, pledging French treasury funds never actually paid; it was completed within seven years, and a statue of Napoleon — crowned King of Italy inside the cathedral — was placed atop one spire in thanks. The façade reached final form in 1813 under Carlo Amati.

During the Allied bombing of Milan in the Second World War, the gilded Madonnina statue was wrapped in rags so its reflections could not guide bombers, and the stained-glass windows were removed and replaced with rolled canvas; the cathedral was hit and damaged, less severely than nearby La Scala, and its central bronze doors still bear scars from bomb fragments that exploded close by. It was quickly repaired and became a gathering place for displaced residents. The remaining arches, spires and southern-wall statues were finished over the following decades, and the last portal was inaugurated on 6 January 1965 — the practical end of a process running for generations, though some blocks remained uncarved.

By the mid-20th century the four central pillars supporting the tiburio, marble-faced masonry bound with lime and broken brick, were under uneven strain worsened by traffic vibration and a sinking water table; earlier repairs had concealed rather than solved the problem. By 1969, with marble breaking off the pillars into the naves, the area was closed to traffic and metro trains were slowed; structural restoration ran 1981–1986, timed to the building's six-hundredth anniversary. The Veneranda Fabbrica del Duomo di Milano still carries out its upkeep, under Italian national heritage protection; the façade was renovated 2003–2009, uncovering the original colour of the Candoglia marble. Facing pollution damage and reduced funding, management in 2012 offered its spires for "adoption" to donors.