Milan’s greatest moment was one in her art, and in her public life. The same spirit of freedom which stood up to Barbarossa and Frederick II., raised her incomparable brick buildings of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In this development of architecture on the large and reasonable lines of the old Roman building, modified by the mystic ideas and melancholy sentiment of the North, and by the capabilities of the rich and plastic material yielded by the alluvial soil, Lombardy shows the highest result of the mingled elements of her artistic life. When no longer inspired by freedom, architecture was still fostered in Milan by ostentatious tyranny, and continued to be the most genial art of the people. In the fourteenth century, the Visconti raised beautiful churches and palaces, but the builders inclined more and more to abandon the national traditions for Gothic lightness and grace. In the crowning work of the Cathedral, the false Gothic ideal finally triumphed. The classical revival, which followed under the Sforza and filled the city anew with churches and palaces, was communicated to Milan by Tuscan architects. It was cherished by the eclectic spirit of princes and nobles, and owed nothing to popular impulse. But in adapting her peculiar material, brick, to the new style, Lombardy gave it a local and special character, and only when the vulgar exaggeration of the classic fashion overwhelmed Italy in a general flood of baroque extravagance, did Lombardy lose architectural individuality. Sculpture, as the handmaid of architecture, was also actively practised in Milan from the twelfth century onwards. The same masters from the shores of Como, from the valley of Antelamo, close to Maggiore, from Campione near Lugano, who carried the Lombard or Romanesque style all over North Italy and into Tuscany in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, built her churches and carved upon the façades mystical figures and devices. The Romanesque sculpture remaining in Milan is very rude, and the names of its authors are in few cases remembered. In the fourteenth century the family or guild of masters from Campione is prominent in the records of Milanese architecture and sculpture, and individuals are distinguished by name. Under the guidance of the Pisan sculptor Giovanni di Balduccio, one of the ablest of Nicola Pisano’s followers, who worked long in Milan, these Campionese produced numberless sepulchral monuments, a few of which survive still in the churches and museums. The Pisan traditions appear in them, modified by the native character. The classic nobility and severity, the ideal grace of Nicola and Giovanni Pisano degrade into heaviness and coarseness in these ruder and more realistic hands, and the forms learnt from them are remoulded according to certain inveterate predilections which persist always in Lombard sculpture.