The unexpected is always the best

The unexpected is always the best. But there is, in this wide world, one thing which disturbs our esthesis of beauty – the obviousness of it. If everywhere we go we hear about the beauty of something, we start to doubt its’ existence. If everyone says it is beautiful, can it be real? Because the beautiful, seems to be in the clutches of a mystery. This is a story of how I understood that beauty can be just obvious and there’s nothing wrong with it.

As we look at the history of aesthetics, it seems that there are some indisputable beautiful forms. We might find out that none of the poems, paintings and music pieces was able to bring us closer to the true meaning of beauty which is impossible to describe in any human language. Well, maybe the French and their belles infideles would achieve the most in this task, but would it be able, to tell the truth – one of the main ingredients of beauty?

Inherently likely we appreciate this, what’s unusual. As we travel with our fingers on the map of Europe, we know that the obligatory thing to see is the Eiffel Tower. I will not adjudicate if this building is beautiful or not, but in Paris, there’s another place that everyone has to visit – The Cathedral of Notre Dame. From Paris, we can easily manage to get to Milan. It seems that these two cities have quite a lot in common – they share the love to fashion, richness and croissants (or, as we like to say it here in Milan – le brioche). They also have two very characteristic cathedrals. The counterpart of the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris is Santa Maria Nascente or The Duomo of Milan. The Duomo is two centuries younger than Notre Dame. Raised for the glory of God but also for the glory of a man.

Duke Gian Galeazzo Visconti, the initiator of the construction of Duomo, was a man of culture, politics and law. Even though the nowadays people would like to call him egocentric (and even if this human weakness would be the main reason of the construction of Duomo), the final effect definitely doesn’t make you think about the worldliness of the intentions of the duke.

But let’s let Gian rest in peace and look at the work of art which main attempt is to express the greatness of God. The building, if I can even use this word to describe it, lies in the city center, in its’ unconquered heart. The Duomo’s countless sculptures scratch the sky, undercutting its’ abdomen and over and over bring closer to each other this what’s human and this what’s divine. When you see the cathedral for the first time, you can fall for this ethereal feeling. The cathedral overwhelms the soul and it’s the first sign that we came to meet something situated high above the reality. If you spend in the city enough time, you start to feel kind of commitment to the view of the cathedral. Sometimes you can not even realise that you’re going there and suddenly find yourself at the stairs of its’ white, pink, orange, grey, blue marm – after all, it’s made out of a unique bullion, the marm of Candoglia, which color changes depending on the angle of incidence of the Sun.

It’s not the only way the Cathedral is so close to the Sun. Milan is crossed by the meridian, which is reflected in the flooring by a golden line. There’s a hole in the vault through which the sunlight falls on this line and in this way we can determine the highest position of the Sun – the noon. We can only get closer and closer to the divine, which Lady is La Madonnina, as the Milaneses call St. Mary, the highest among all the sculptures, raised on the top of the cathedral. To these days there’s the law which permits to build an edifice higher than the crown of 12 stars that weave Milan’s sky.

In Milan, even if it’s raining and Duomo is bathed in greyness, the netherworld is calling us. But not this dark and humid one, through which we used to travel with Charon. Today still, since the time of, nomen omen, Edict of Milan, we can travel to the luminosity. You can just pass through the threshold of one of the greatest miracles we are the ancestors of as long as we seek for beauty. Nobody will put coins on our eyes anymore and Antigone will not insist on burying our remains. We just need to do as the Visconti duke wished – to love his city and the masterpiece that he made in the name of the eternity.