Ospedale Maggiore
Ospedale Maggiore, traditionally named "Ca' Granda" (meaning "big house") is a building located in the center of Milan, Italy, constructed in the 15th century as one of the first community hospitals. In the present, the beautiful Renaissance building, with its glorious medical history, houses the State University of Milan.
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Ospedale Maggiore was designed as one of the first examples of Renaissance architecture in Lombardy, by architect Antonio Filarete, under the commission of Francesco Sforza, for whom the former has also designed the main tower of the Sforza Castle.
The hospital was founded for the poor and for patients with hope of recovery. The building was built by engineer Guiniforte Solari and had its ornamentation carried out by Giovanni Antonio Amadeo.
The hospital was built as a two story building with a long, horizontally developed layout, inspired by the Florentine rules of architectural equilibrium. The building takes up almost all of the street front of Via Festa del Perdono. The red brick facade with subtle ornamentation features a long and elegant archway opening, with large round arches, on the ground floor and Gothic pointed arch windows with miniature corinthic columns on the first floor. The archway is distinguished by graceful corinthic capitel columns and, above every column, ornamental sculpted medallions which associate this building to the similar Renaissance masterpiece hospital by Brunelleschi, the Ospedale degli Innocenti in Florence.
The building opens through a similar archway, extending over both floors, on the inner facade, toward a 17th century courtyard. This facade displays many features which would become Renaissance specific, such as the rows of half-engaged columns, window tympanums and medallions.
The entrance, with the dominant tympanum and flanked by statues, beautifully displays the triumph of Renaissance over Gothic style, as well as their harmonious combination, inspiring the typically Italian mixture of simplicity and monumentality.
Beside the relics testifying the building's significant medical history, such as the memorial tablets of the Hospital foundation and of Saint Camillus de Lellis, Ospedale Maggiore houses a historical medical collection, the monument for the eminent physician Luigi Sacco, the Luigi Mangiagalli statue and the Andrea Verga monument.
