Branda da Castiglione

[citation needed] Branda was the eldest son of Maffiolo da Castiglione and his wife Lucrezia Porro, of the family of the counts of Polenta.

In 1393 he was made archpriest of San Martino di Legnano Veronese and a canon at the city of Tortona; in 1398 he possessed six benefices in the archdiocese of Milan and others beyond it.

In August 1404 he was made bishop of Piacenza; under the unsettled conditions of the Western Schism the see was not automatically secure: he was deposed and replaced by Pope Gregory XII in 1409.

The Council elected Pietro Filargo, archbishop of Milan, who sat briefly as Pope Alexander V and reinstated Branda and maintained him in the see of Piacenza.

He represented the Visconti in treaty negotiations at Florence, and participated in the conclave of 1431 that elected a successor to Martin V, Pope Eugenius IV.

[11] He returned to Castiglione Olona, where he became ill in December 1442 and died in early February 1443 in his Palazzo Branda, aged ninety-three.

Leonardo Griffi composed the elogy at his funeral and Branda's secretary, Giovanni da Olmütz, deposited his vita on parchment in the stone sarcophagus.

[12] Intimate with the powerful of his day, and renowned for the simplicity and modesty of his personal life, Branda was in touch with the literary and artistic movements that got under way in his lifetime, the early Renaissance.