A door on the north side of the church leads into the canonica, and one steps out from the grand old Lombard basilica into a beautiful portico of the Renaissance period. Lodovico il Moro intended to raise here a stately residence for the Canons. He charged Bramante of Urbino with the work, but the much occupied architect had little time to devote to it, and it dragged on, so that only this one side of the cloister, and that unfinished, was built before the Moro’s fall put an end to all his ambitious schemes. This fragment, at once so noble and so graceful in its proportions, and showing a fine and restrained taste in the capitals, is almost certainly of Bramante’s design, which is more than can be said of most of the work attributed to him in this city. The delicious _putti_, in every charming pose, and plastic as life itself, which decorate the labels upon the arches, show the development of Italian art in the three centuries which divide them from the grotesque sculptures in the church. How interesting, too, the contrast between the treatment of arch and pillar, of brick and stone, by the learned and sophisticated Quattrocentist, and the same forms, the same materials in the hands of the rude, vigorous, and deeply religious generation which built the church. The cloister, in its incompleteness, leaning up against the old basilica, monument of democratic fervour and strength, is a poignant relic of the aristocratic and exclusive ideas of the Renaissance, and of the incomparable grace and joyousness of their brief reign in Milan. The profiles of the two presiding spirits of that moment, Lodovico and Beatrice, are moulded on either side of the doorway by a mediocre Lombard sculptor of the Renaissance period. A quaint chimney, upon the house facing the cloister, is an interesting example of a type once common in Milan, and still often seen in the neighbouring towns. Adjoining the basilica is the old convent, now a military hospital, with two fine cloisters, designed, it is thought, by Bramante. Among the lime-trees on the piazza, near the church on the north side, stands an antique column, a relic of some pagan building, either the Roman temple, which is supposed to have preceded the basilica, or of a summer palace of the emperors, which stood beside it. An ingenious thirteenth century chronicler, one Daniele, in an imaginary description of the coronation of the mediæval kings in St. Ambrogio, makes this column play an important part in the ceremony. _The King must swear the oath outside the church, where a marble column stands.... He must kiss the said column, because as the column is upright, so must the judgment of the sovereign be upright._ A more faithful account of the ritual at the coronations is given by the tenth century chronicler, Landolfo the Elder. [Illustration: CHIMNEY, CANONICA OF ST. AMBROGIO.] CHAPTER XII _San Lorenzo. Romanesque Buildings_