CAGNO'LA, LUIGI, MARQUIS, one of the most distinguished Italian architects of the present century, was born at Milan in 1762, of an ancient patrician family. At the age of fourteen, Luigi was sent by his father, the Marchese Gaetano Cagnola, to the Clementine College at Rome, and thence in 1781 to the university of Pavia, in order to study jurisprudence; but, although he was far from neglecting his studies, bis passion for arohitecture was insuperable, and he resolved to devote himself exclusively to that art, notwithstanding that profes sional practice in it was deemed somewhat derogatory in one of his rank and station. For a while Cagnola held some official posts in the civil government of Milan ; but at length ventured to put forth three different designs for the Porta Orientale, then about to be erected at Milan. Cagnola's designs were approved, but that by Piermarini was adopted, as being more economical. He now engaged the services of a clever artist, named Aureglio, and undertook a series of illustrations of the ancient baths of Maximian, near the church of San Lorenzo, published under the title of 'Antichith Lombardico-Milanesi ;' and he was afterwards employed by the government (1812) to secure from further ruin the sixteen noble Corinthian marble columns which constitute the chief remains of that monument of antiquity. The death of his father, in 1799, devolved upon Cagnola an important share in public affairs, when, besides being one of the state council, he was attached to the army commissariat in the Austrian service. On the change of the government by the establishment of the Cisalpine Republic, he withdrew from Milan, and spent about two years at Verona and Venice, fully occupied in studying the architectural treasures of those cities. Soon after his return, he erected in 1802 a noble villa for the brothers Zurla, at Cremi, near Vajano ' • and about the same period designed the magnificent catafalchi' for the funeral obsequies of Archbishop Viconti, the Patriarch Gamberi, and Count Anguissola, published in folio, 1802. On the marriage of the Viceroy Eugene Beauharnois with the Princess Amelia of Bavaria in 1806, he was called upon to erect another grand temporary structure; but such was the admiration excited by the arch constructed of wood on that occasion, that it was determined to perpetuate it in marble. Accord ingly, the first stone of the Porta del Sempione, or, as it is now called, the Arco della Pace, was laid October 14, 1807. The political changes which afterwards took place threatened to put a atop to the work altogether, when it was not advanced beyond the piers of the arches. Almost the idea of its being ever completed had been abandoned, when, on his visit to Milan, the emperor Francis I. of Austria, ordered the works to be resumed ; and from that time they were prosecuted without interruption, so that Cagnola saw the whole structure very nearly terminated before his death. With the exception of the Arc de
l'Etoile at Paris, the Arco della Pace is by far the largest as well as most magnificent structure of the kind in modern times, and in its general mass it is equal to, even if it does not somewhat exceed, the largest of the ancient—the Arch of Constantine; it being 78 feet English wide, as many high, and about 27 feet deep.
Another publio monument by him at Milan, which is greatly admired, is the Porta di Marengo, otherwise called Porte Ticinenae, an Ionic propylaeum, whose two fronts consist of a distyle in antis, consequently of three open interoolumns, and the two sides or ends are filled in with an open arch.
The Campanile nt Urgnano in the Bergamasque territory, begun in 1824 and finished in 1829, exhibits more of design and composition than the preceding. It is a circular tower of three orders, Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian, upon a square rusticated basement, each order consisting of eight half-columns, and between those of the Corinthian order are as many open arches. Above this last rises an additional order of Caryatid figures supporting a hemispherical dome : the entire height from the ground is 58 metres, or 190 English feet. The eleva tion of this Campanile is engraved in the Ape dells Belle Arte ' Rome, 1835. Among other works executed by Cagnola are the chapel of Santa Marcellina in the church of San Ambrogio, at Milan; • the church at Concorrezzo; the facade of that at Vivallo; and the church at Ghisalba in the Bergamaaque. This last, which was not completed till after his death, in 1835, is his noblest work of the kind, and is a rotunda of the Corinthian order, with a portico of fourteen columns. The interior has sixteen columns of the same order. Besides those which were carried into execution, Cagnola produced a great number of designs and projects, in several of which he gave such free scope to his invention and grandezza of ideas, as to render their adoption hopeless; such, for instance, was that for an Hospitium on the aumm:t of Mount Cenia, with no fewer than 110 columns 11 English feet in diameter—to which may be added his designs for a senate house and a magnificent triumphal bridge. He also indulged his taste without regard to cost in improving or nearly rebuilding his villa at Inverigo near Milan, which occupied him during the last years of his life, and which he directed to be completed by his widow.
Cagnola died of apoplexy, August 14th, 1833, at tho age of seventy one. There is a portrait of him in Fiirster's Bauzeitung' for 1838, with an accompanying memoir, to which we are indebted for some of the particulars in this article.