The painting was purchased for the Cariplo Collection on the antique market in 1987. Produced in 1888, it presents a view of the interior of Milan Cathedral [1] and bears witness to Ferrari’s recurrent interest in what was a scholastic subject at the time, already addressed by the artist in an early work.

The work documents the completed transition of perspective painting from the simple exercise in geometry and description of academic teaching to evocative experimentation with the interplay of light and colour in explorations carried out from life.

Both the precise, clear-cut vision constructed through a solid perspective grid (visible in the geometric motif of the marble paving) and the small genre scene of flirtation between the soldier and the young woman in the foreground still belong to the tradition of view painting. What characterises Ferrari’s art in the 1880s is, however, above all his study of the innovations developed by Filippo Carcano, the undisputed leader of Lombard naturalism, and Mosè Bianchi. Ferrari soon established himself as a perspective painter on the basis of these models and won the Fumagalli Prize in 1884 with Chapel in the Church of Sant’Antonio, presented at the Esposizione di Belle Arti di Brera and subsequently repeated in the version now in the Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Milan [2]. The different versions of the view presented by Carcano at the Brera and at the Promotrice exhibition in Turin between 1872 and 1879 – including the Interior of Milan Cathedral of 1874 [3] (Milan, Banca Intesa) – provided the basis, many years later, for this perspective view, which conveys an impression of breadth and space also through the use of diffuse light for evidently naturalistic purposes.