Artisti industriosi e speculativi.Paolo Morigia e il Quinto Libro della Nobiltà di Milano

The title of this book, Industrious and Speculative Artists, quotes the words used by Paolo Morigia (1525-1604) in the Fifth Book of his Nobiltà di Milano (1595) to define the artists active in Milan at the end of the Sixteenth century. Here the Author hastily fixes city painters, sculptors and architects and instead focus on the workshops of the masters who had transformed Milan into the capital of European luxury, animated by embroiderers, illuminators, carvers of semi-precious stones and crystals, goldsmiths, silversmiths, armourers, prolific makers (therefore industrious) of inventions (therefore speculative) intended for connoisseurs of the time, such as court men, churchmen or collectors. The artistic information collected in the Nobiltà di Milano and in some earlier works (such as the Historia dell’antichità di Milano, 1592) were immediately used by the scholars of subsequent generations, so much so that the texts of Paolo Morigia became almost only mining mines of information excavated uncritically. For the first time, this book relocates Paolo Morigia to the center, reconstructing his religious culture (he was a Jesuate), his artistic tastes (addressed primarily to the Milanese church of San Gerolamo, now disappeared) and relationships (for example with a branch of the Trivulzio family linked to the Habsburgs). In the second part it presents the commentary and the recheck of the news on the artists collected in the Fifth Book of the Nobiltà di Milano, followed by an anthology that proposes it alongside other texts useful for understanding their history and development.