Pinacoteca di Brera
Milan’s Brera is unique among Italy’s major art galleries in that it isn’t founded on the riches of the church or a noble family, but the policies of Napoleon, who suppressed churches across the region and took their riches off to galleries and academies. Over the next two centuries, the collections grew to take in some of the best Renaissance-era painting from Northern Italy, representatives of the Venetian school and several giants of central Italy, including Raphael and Piero della Francesca.
Via Brera 28, Milan • 02 722 631 • booking line 02 9280 0361 • www.brera.beniculturali.it • 8:30am–7:15pm Tue–Sun (last adm 6:30pm) • Adm; free for EU citizens under 18 or over 65 or disabled
1. Umberto Boccioni’s Riot in the Galleria
In this work of 1911, the Milanese are dashing for the doors of Caffè Zucca. A companion, The City Rises, is also here.
2. Gentile Fabriano’s Valle Romita Polyptych
The Brera worked hard to reconstitute this altarpiece of 1410. The five main panels came with Napoleon; the other four were tracked down and purchased later.
3. Mantegna’s Dead Christ
Mantegna was one of the Renaissance’s greatest perspective virtuosos, and this is his foreshortened masterpiece, painted in about 1500.
4. Giovanni Bellini’s Virgin and Child
The Brera houses several masterpieces by the early Venetian Renaissance master Bellini, including two very different versions of Virgin and Child. One is almost a Flemish-style portrait, painted when Bellini was 40. The other is a luminous scene of colour and light, painted 40 years later.
5. Tintoretto’s Finding the Body of St Mark
Tintoretto uses his mastery of drama and light in this work of the 1560s to highlight the finding of the body of St Mark by Venetian merchants in the Crusades.
6. Piero della Francesca’s Montefeltro Altarpiece
This 1472 scene shows Piero’s patron the Duke of Montefeltro kneeling before the Virgin and Child. Just months earlier, the Duke’s beloved wife had given birth to a male heir, who tragically died within weeks.
7. Raphael’s Marriage of the Virgin
In this early work depicting the Virgin Mary’s terrestrial marriage to Joseph, Raphael took the idea and basic layout from his Umbrian master Perugino, tweaking it with a perfected single-point perspective.
8. Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus
This 1605 work was Caravaggio’s second painting of the Supper. The deep-black shadows and bright highlights create mood and tension.
9. Canaletto’s Bacino di San Marco
The undisputed master of 18th-century Venetian cityscapes did at least seven versions of this scene of St Mark’s bell tower and the Doge’s Palace.
10. Francesco Hayez’s The Kiss
This passionate 1859 scene – painted when Hayez was 68 – was intended as an allegory of the struggle for independence and the importance of family.
The Palace
The late Baroque Palazzo di Brera was built from 1591 to 1658 as a Jesuit college, but not completed until 1774. The palace’s vast courtyard centres around a bronze statue of Napoleon in the guise of Mars. The statue, commissioned in 1807, was installed 52 years later in 1859.
Tip: Make sense of the works on display with the excellent audio guides. Tip: Cheap guided tours for any number of people are available weekdays, but must be booked 2–3 days in advance. Tip: The bars of the Brera district make for great snacking or a post-gallery apéritif.The Brera Collections
1. 13th-Century Paintings (Rooms II–IV)
Italian art simply wouldn’t be the same without the naturalism, bright colours and emotive qualities that Giotto brought to the world of painting, and his influence is clear in works such as Three Scenes from the Life of St Columna by Giovanni Baronzio of Rimini. Other works here trace the Gothic style from Central Italy (Ambrogio Lorenzetti and Andrea di Bartolo) to Venice (Lorenzo Veneziano and Jacopo Bellini). The best works are Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Virgin and Child and Gentile da Fabriano’s Valle Romita polyptych.
2. Jesi Collection of 20th Century Art (Room X)
When Maria Jesi donated her fine hoard in 1976, the Brera became the first major museum in Italy to acquire a significant 20th-century collection. See Boccioni’s Riot in the Galleria. Other master-works are by Morandi, Severini, Modigliani, Picasso and Braque.
3. Venetian Renaissance (Rooms V–IX; XII; XIV)
It is the art of Venice that steals the show at the Brera, and the bulk of the museum’s important and memorable works fill these ten rooms: Mantegna’s Dead Christ and numerous superlative works by his brother-in-law Giovanni Bellini. It all culminates in the brushy, stormy, wondrously lit and intriguingly coloured scenes of Venice’s High Renaissance trio: Tintoretto, Titian and Paolo Veronese.
4. Lombard Renaissance (Rooms XIII; XV–XIX)
The stars of the Lombard section are the 16th-century Campi clan from Cremona, painters inspired by Raphael and, above all, Leonardo da Vinci. Tiny Room XIX is devoted to the direct heirs of the Leonardo revolution: Il Bergognone and Bernardino Luini.
5. Marchese Renaissance (Rooms XXI; XXIII)
These rooms feature Flemish-inspired artists and 15th-century painters from the central Marches province. The latter took local art from the post-Giotto Gothicism into a courtly Early Renaissance style, exemplified by Carlo Crivelli.
6. Tuscan Renaissance (Rooms XXIV–XXVII)
The paintings here are few, but they’re stunners: Piero’s Montefeltro Altarpiece and Raphael’s Marriage of the Virgin, alongside works by Bramante, Signorelli and Bronzino.
7. 17th-Century Bolognese Renaissance (Room XXVIII)
As Florence and Rome got swept away with Mannerist fantasies and experiments, Bolognese artists held the line on Classical Renaissance ideals. In this room we see Ludovico Caracci, Il Guercino and Guido Reni engaged in an ever more crystalline and reductive naturalistic style.
8. Caravaggio and his Followers (Room XXIX)
Caravaggio’s use of harsh contrast and dramatic tension in paintings such as the Supper at Emmaus influenced a generation of painters. The works of some of the best of them – Mattia Preti, Jusepe de Ribera and Orazio Gentilleschi – are hung here too.
9. Baroque and Rococo (Rooms XXX–XXXVI)
In the late 16th century, Italy moved from Renaissance naturalism to the more ornate style of the Baroque, with Daniele Crespi and Pietro da Cortona to the fore. The Baroque fed off its own over-blown conventions until it became Rococo, a style heralded by Tiepolo and Giuseppe Maria Crespi.
10. 19th-Century Painting (Rooms XXXVII; XXXVIII)
There’s not so much to pique one’s interest in these final rooms, save Francesco Hayez’s monumental scenes and the pseudo-Impressionist Macchiaioli school (Fattori, Segantini and Lega).
