Milan is the city where, in the 20th century, we find the greatest density of artisan workshops specializing in stained glass windows. It is also the place where modern materials and languages were experimented with. These new achievements can be seen firs in the area of stained glass for civil use but gradually began to find application in sacred stained glass as well. This evolution is particularly evident in the years when Giovanni Battista Montini, later pope Paul VI, lived. He witnessed the renewal of sacred art in France and then promoted a similar process in Italy. At the beginning of the century, workshops such as Beltrami e C., Corvaya and Bazzi or the roman Giuliani workshop followed nineteenth-century traditions, but later, especially in the 1930s, it emerges how the language of Novecento Italiano and artists of other modern tendencies found expression in the field of stained glass, especially thanks to the artisans of the FontanaArte workshop. In the 1940s and 1950s there was also a moderate renewal in the Milan Cathedral’s stained glass, but the real changes were observed in the 1960s: in the Duomo building site the first female creator of stained glass, Amalia Panigati arrives; in Gio Ponti’s architectures, a new three-dimensionality of stained glass was experimented thanks to the collaboration with FontanaArte and Fornace Venini. Lastly, in the early 1970s, the lyrical abstractionism of Costantino Ruggeri’s stained glass flourished.
