LE PITTURE MURALI DELLA SALA DELLE ASSE NEL CASTELLO SFORZESCO DI MILANO: L'ICONOGRAFIA DEL MOTIVO AD ALBERI PRIMA E DOPO LEONARDO

The Ph.D. thesis research entitled Le pitture murali della Sala delle Asse al Castello Sforzesco: l'iconografia del motivo ad alberi prima e dopo Leonardo was born in the context of a professional collaboration with the City of Milan through the Artistic Collections of the Castello Sforzesco, to which we owe the restoration project of the room - decorated by Leonardo da Vinci at the end of the fifteenth century - called 'Sala delle Asse'. On its walls we can see painted mulberry trees that develop organically on the lunettes and on the vault, completely covered by intertwining branches, leaves, berries and golden ropes that form a pergola, wiping out the real architecture in an illusionistic way and creating a characteristic room with trees. These paintings, really compromised by the centuries-old military destination and by heavy 20th-century restorations, present now a fragmented aspect that does not allow a clear global reading of the Leonardo's composition, despite the numerous studies made over time. A first goal was to try to contextualize and frame this disruptive invention within an existing iconographic tradition, so as to measure what was the real contribution of Leonardo compared to the idea of the composition of the Castello Sforzesco: part of the critics in fact often described the Sala delle Asse as an absolute unicum, while our research has analyzed a series of rooms and environments (from Italy but also from northern Europe) that, starting from the fourteenth century, were characterized by the dominant presence of paintings simulating trees, woods and pergolas, giving to the visitor the feeling of being in an open space. For example, even in Sforza's Milan the existence of a camera de li arbori (unfortunately lost) in that Palazzo Visconti (later Panigarola) famous for the frescoes by Bramante is well known and documented: a sign that this iconography was widespread and requested and that Leonardo, leaning on this tradition, shaped in an extremely original way, giving life to a monumental naturalistic creation made of powerful plants, rocks and roots, twisting branches and endless interweaving of golden strings. The existence of fifteenth-century decorative complexes with arboreal motifs, such as that of the Parisian Tower by Jean Sans Peur, which would support the hypothesis of an essentially heraldic-celebrative significance of the meaning of the Sala delle Asse composition, has also emerged: as in the French example, in which the emblems of the Duke of Burgundy and his parents become agile plants carved on the vault of the building, in Milan the moro mulberry of Ludovico Sforza (known as il Moro) is transformed into the tree-column that forms a pergola that protects and covers visitors of the room. The study of the echoes and of the sixteenth-century replicas of this brilliant composition, which is the fulcrum of the second part of our research, aimed to calculate the impact it had on artists and patrons, and to help us in ideally reconstructing the lost parts of the paintings of the Sala delle Asse. The few testimonies found, only documented or still existing, have further confirmed the strong celebratory connotation that the room had assumed after the Leonardesque arrangement, being mentioned at the beginning of the XVI century as Camera dei moroni: a so obvious and cumbersome characteristic, in a period of continuous reversals on the political front, which had to compromise the iconographic diffusion, limited to an extremely reduced number of pro-Sforza sites. Finally, we wanted to move this recognition to the Twentieth century, in particular to the moment following the reopening of the Sala delle Asse, which took place in 1902 after nearly four centuries of oblivion; in the sixteenth century the entire decoration had been covered with a plaster and the room was destined to a nursing home for the Spanish army that had occupied the Castello Sforzesco. The heavy restoration work of the early Twentieth century had covered the Leonardesque traces, reviving what remained of the fragile composition, literally transformed into a painting close to the Art Nouveau style by the painter-restorer Ernesto Rusca. The image thus produced was a great success, being replicated and reworked by various artists in ornamental painting, applied arts and editorial graphics, but in a short time lost the connection with Leonardo and the Sala delle Asse to become a simple, pleasant decorative motif. Luca Tosi