On entering the church one cannot but feel grateful that the Moro’s ambitious designs never arrived at the destruction of this beautiful Gothic nave, so simple and so graceful, so devout and suggestive, with its grey columns and hoary colour and touches of faded fresco everywhere. The story goes that Count Gaspare Vimercati, the founder, and Fra Jacopo Sestio, who was in charge of the work for the Dominicans, had much contention over it, the one desiring a fine handsome building, the other a sanctuary suited to the poverty and humility of the friars. They seem to have succeeded in embodying the ideals of both. From the dim Gothic aisles one emerges with a curious sense of contrast into the great space beyond, where immense arches, springing from heavy pilasters, support a lofty dome, whence abundant light pours down from a circle of windows. This is, of course, the later part of the building. The cupola, which is of nobler and severer aspect within than outside, is much disfigured by baroque decorations. The device of painting objects in perspective, to simulate relief, had already attracted the architects even of the great age, as is shown here, where it is used with ingenuity and restraint in the simulated parts of the gallery in the lowest storey of the dome. The Evangelists in the spandrils are a glaring instance of its abuse in later times. The choir has fine stalls of 1470, decorated with figures and elaborate designs in intarsia. High up on the right, near the organ, is a charming fresco by Luini, painted in 1517, of the Virgin and Saints and a devotee, one Laschenaer, an officer of Louis XII.’s. It was to this choir, still unfinished, that the dead body of the young Duchess Beatrice was carried in those mournful early days of 1497, and here that the friars chanted Masses round her bier for seven days and nights without ceasing, and that amid a countless host of mourners bearing torches she was committed to her tomb. Hither came her husband, to weep and pray over her grave, before he abandoned his and her Milan to the invader. Beneath the pavement behind the High Altar she lies now, her infant children beside her. Some say that the Moro’s body, recovered from its far-off exile in France, rests here too beside it, but this is very uncertain. Anyhow a pitiful obscurity covers this grave in which those brief years of an incomparable pride and glory ended—not even a stone marks it now. The monument carved for it by Cristoforo Solari, with the effigies of the husband and wife upon it, has been removed to the Certosa of Pavia.