5 Masterpieces for you

Welcome!
You are about to begin your visit to the Pinacoteca di Brera, whose rooms are all on the first floor of the building. The paintings are displayed in strict geographical and chronological order from the late 13th century to the 19th century. They feature mainly religious subjects because the paintings were originally intended for churches and convents in central and northern Italy.
After passing through the entrance to the Pinacoteca – a large glass door – and going down the corridor, you come to room 6 on your left.
This room houses paintings of the 15th century Venetian school on an electric blue background.
The first masterpiece we discuss, Giovanni Bellini’s Pietà, is on the right wall of the room, while the second masterpiece, Mantegna’s Lamentation over the Dead Christ, is in the center of the room.

Christ is lying on the bare stone, half covered by the sheet in which he will soon be wrapped to be laid in the tomb. He has just been anointed with the scented oils from the jar next to the pillow. The wounds were cleaned of the blood, but the flesh pierced by the nails remains open; the hands show their backs and the feet protrude from the stone, pushing into the foreground all the rawness of the Passion.
With his strong presence Christ occupies almost the entire surface of the canvas. At the bottom you can see a bare wall and on the right an opening towards darkness.
The last farewell is entrusted to three characters, relegated to the left corner: John the Evangelist with his hands entwined and his face marked by wrinkles of pain; the Madonna, elderly, with her mouth bent by tears; the Magdalene, whose nose and mouth are only barely visible, opened in a heartbreaking cry. The reflectography which reveals the drawing below showed that the figures of the mourners were conceived from the beginning and the unpainted edges of the canvas confirm that there were no cuts.
Mantegna expressly uses this very engaging close-up shot of a Christ in a daring perspective: in this work he reaches the apex of his research of the foreshortened figure, taking up a theme already addressed in the oculus of the Chamber of the Spouses in Mantua known for the virtuosity of the putti seen from below. Mantegna applied the rules of perspective correctly, but to reach the desired result made some changes; for example, he enlarged the head so it was not smaller than the feet, so that Christ retained his dignity to leave to posterity an image of extraordinary strength.
Even the choice of the technique is essential to the painting’s pathos: a light tempera in which colors combined with animal glue are spread on a thin preparation and made deliberately opaque and dull, thanks to the absence of final varnish.
The history of the painting is complex and still uncertain.
It was probably done around 1483, when a fragment of the stone of Christ’s anointing arrived in Mantua. We know that among the riches in the artist’s studio at his death in 1506 there was a “Cristo in scurto”, that is in perspective, which could be that of Brera. If so, the work would have remained in the painter’s studio for many years, leading some scholars to believe that Mantegna painted it for his private devotion and not for a client. The painting entered the museum in 1824 after Giuseppe Bossi, secretary of the Academy and of the Pinacoteca di Brera, found it in the early 19th century at an antiquarian art dealer’s in Rome.
This work was known and referred to in the painting of various periods, as can be seen in The Finding of the body of St Mark by Tintoretto, exhibited in room 9 of the Pinacoteca. Quotes and suggestions inspired by this work reach up to the 20th century, in the cinema of Pasolini and in the photographs of Che Guevara dead, showing the power of this authentic, immortal masterpiece.

As you walk through the rooms, you will see the colossal plaster statue of Napoleon as Mars the Peacemaker, the bronze version of which you have already encountered in the Palace’s courtyard of honour. The statue, cast from Antonio Canova’s marble model, is displayed here to celebrate the opening of the Pinacoteca on 15th August, 1809. It was in those years that Brera was converted, at Napoleon Bonaparte’s behest, from a picture gallery reserved for the students of the academy into a major national gallery open to an ever-growing audience.

Proceeding on the tour, you enter room 18 which houses our restoration laboratory, where the museum’s restorers study and care for the paintings in the collection, often under the gaze of visitors. The laboratory was designed by Sottsass Associati.

As though conducting a journey from northern to central Italy, you have admired paintings from the Veneto and Lombardy in the Napoleonic halls and paintings from Emilia and the Marche in the red rooms. Now, past the on-site storage facility, the journey takes you all the way to Urbino in room 24. All the paintings in this room are closely linked to the court of Urbino, an important centre in the development of Renaissance art.
Here you will find the next two masterpieces on this tour.

The Madonna sits in the middle of an orderly group of saints and angels;
her eyes are low and her hands are joined while she is holding Jesus asleep on her lap. On his knees is the patron Federico da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino. He wears armor with a cloak; the sword is tied to the belt, the knobs, the stick and the helmet are resting on the ground. The last-named object bears the trace of the blow suffered during a tournament that had made him one-eyed, forcing him to be portrayed in profile. The characters are in a classical church with walls decorated with polychrome marble slabs. The barrel vault that covers the apse is punctuated by ceiling coffers, which give depth to the space, and it is decorated with a large shell from which hangs an egg attached to a small chain.
The work arrived in Brera in 1811 from the Church of San Bernardino, just outside Urbino.
The date of the painting’s creation is still uncertain. One of the hypotheses is that Piero painted it around 1472, the year in which the ducal heir Guidobaldo was born, but Federico’s wife Battista Sforza died. In that same year Federico, an educated man who earned his wealth as a captain of fortune, conquered Volterra on behalf of Florence. Some elements in the canvas would confirm this reading: the Duke’s armor, worn as if to celebrate the recent victory; the choice to include John the Baptist, the first saint on the left, to commemorate his late wife Battista, who is absent in the painting; the shell and egg, symbols of birth, would be placed to greet the arrival of Guidobaldo.
To the meanings linked to the life of the Montefeltro family, devotional ones are added: the sleep of Jesus and his necklace of blood red coral refer to the Passion; the shell and the egg instead remind viewers that Jesus will be reborn on the day of Resurrection. The egg, a model of geometric perfection, is the symbolic center of the painting. It seems suspended above the head of the Madonna but, if you look more carefully, you will notice that the figures are in fact in front of and not inside the apse. The egg is therefore far away, and of considerable size: it is an ostrich egg.
According to a medieval belief, the ostrich abandons her egg in the desert, where the sun fertilizes and broods over it; its presence in the painting could allude to the Virgin, who became a mother thanks to the Holy Spirit.
The particular ability of Piero to compose such solemn and convincing spaces comes from his study of mathematics and perspective. His passion for the mathematical sciences, together with his interest in the effects of light on objects, are the hallmarks of his style.
In the painting, the light comes from a source we see reflected on the shoulder of Federico’s armor, an arched window, and perhaps a small oculus. Referring to the Flemish art known at the court of Urbino, Piero captures the sheen of the diadems of the angels; he renders the transparency of the angel’s robe to the left of the Virgin and the crystalline cross of Saint Francis, who opens his tunic to show the wound in his chest.
The silent figures with quiet gestures, who inhabit a space immersed in a suspended time, make this work not only a masterpiece of Renaissance culture, but an eternal mystery of beauty.

In the large square in front of the temple, Mary and Joseph marry in the presence of the high priest who joins their hands. Accompanied by her maids of honour, the Virgin receives the ring from Joseph, as described in the apocryphal Gospels and in the Golden Legend, a medieval text that collected the lives of the saints. In these sources it is said that, inspired by God, the high priest of Jerusalem asked Mary’s suitors to each come to the temple with a dry twig. Among them Joseph was chosen, because his twig miraculously bloomed once laid on the altar of the temple. Behind him there are five other suitors who keep their twigs with no flowers: in the foreground one of them breaks the rod with his knee, while another, just behind, more discreetly bends it with apparent carelessness.
At the center of the square, marked by the sequence of perspectival paving slabs, there is a sixteen-sided temple with a double open door. The view thus penetrates beyond the harmonious architecture by following the vanishing lines of perspective.
Above the central arch of the temple the signature appears: RAPHAEL URBINAS, and the date in Roman numerals, 1504.
Raphael was born in Urbino in 1483. At the age of around twenty, he was commissioned to carry out this work for the Chapel of San Giuseppe in San Francesco church in Città di Castello. Probably the clients had asked him to take as a model the Marriage of the Virgin by Perugino, painted in those same years for the chapel of the Perugia Cathedral that housed the alleged relic of the Virgin’s wedding ring.
The comparison with the work of Perugino, today at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Caen, shows how the young Raphael was already able to change the course of Renaissance art. The central plan temple, which in Perugino is a background looming over the characters in the foreground, becomes in Raphael the pivot from which originates a space that expands towards infinity. Raphael doubles the sides of the temple of Perugino and creates a portico supported by Ionic columns. The curve of the dome is recalled by the figures in the foreground who are not lined up, as in Perugino, along a hypothetical horizontal line, but ordered in semicircles which can be seen by looking at the feet of the nearest characters, aligned along a regular curve.
Raphael shows himself to be a true master of rhythm and geometry, and paints a very calibrated composition, studied in every detail, but communicated with extreme grace and naturalness. In the same way, the young master chooses the colours, playing with similarities and contrasts whose perfect balance increases the fame that rightly accompanies this work.

In a setting dominated by darkness, light comes from the left to illuminate the scene. Christ is blessing the newly broken bread. His gaze is downward, and his face is slightly inclined. The man in profile juts out his neck and frowns, leaning forward to better see what is happening as if he does not believe his eyes, while the other, from behind, shows his amazement with raised and open hands. The innkeeper, who looks perplexed, and the servant, on the contrary, remain strangers to the event because they do not recognize the gesture of Jesus. On the table are a few elements: two loaves, a ceramic plate with herbs, a pewter plate and a carafe. Just behind, a glass of red wine.
The moment depicted concludes the episode described in the Gospel of Luke, in which two disciples walk part of the way from Jerusalem to Emmaus with a traveler, to whom they confide their sadness at the death of Jesus. When evening comes, the disciples invite the man to have dinner with them in an inn. Only when they see him blessing and breaking the bread, repeating the gestures of the Last Supper, do they understand that he is the Risen Christ. Immediately afterwards he disappears from sight.
Caravaggio stages the moment of the unexpected revelation. Christ is depicted with his face half immersed in the shadow into which he will immediately disappear.
Caravaggio painted the canvas at a crucial moment in his life. In May 1606 he killed a rival in Rome. Waiting to know his fate, he fled to an estate outside of town, between Paliano, Zagarolo and Palestrina, perhaps protected by the powerful Colonna family. But he did not stop painting. He made this canvas in hiding. It is the second version of a theme that he had already addressed a few years earlier in another painting now exhibited at the National Gallery in London.
Sentenced to death, Caravaggio was then forced to leave the Papal States, thus beginning the last troubled phase of his life.
The skill with which Caravaggio uses light and shadow painted in earthy tones gives the Brera version an intimacy and lyricism lacking in the more theatrical version of London. The work represents a turning point in Caravaggio’s style, characterized by a greater attention to the expressive and dramatic charge of the scene, all focused on the characters and the very few objects surrounded by darkness. Light tells that a revelation had occurred. The shadow rests on bodies and things represented truthfully; it emphasizes gestures and expressions; it crosses the face of a Christ veiled with melancholy; it enters the furrow of the bread irregularly broken, true to the plainness that Caravaggio brought with him from his education in Lombardy.
The painting, which entered the Pinacoteca in 1939 thanks to the contribution of the Friends of Brera Association, is one of the only two works by Caravaggio in Milan; the other is the famous Canestra di frutta [“Basket of Fruit”] at the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana.

The following rooms, up to room 33, house examples of 17th century painting, while room 34, devoted to the art of the 18th century, hosts, among others, the first paintings ever to have joined the Brera collection.
You are now passing through the corridor between rooms 35 and 36, which offer a glimpse into the painting of the 18th century in the Veneto and Lombardy, including work by Canaletto, Guardi, Fra Galgario, and Pitocchetto. Room 37, on the other hand, is devoted to 19th century painting, as is room 38.

Two young people, held in an embrace, kiss passionately. She puts her hand on his shoulder and he holds her head to pull it towards himself. Their faces are almost completely hidden, while their lips touch. It seems to be a farewell kiss, since the young man, ready to leave, already has a foot on the step.
A threat seems to loom over them: the shadow of a person on the wall on the opening to the left is disturbing. They may be located in the entrance hall of a castle; on the upper right is the lower part of a dark window.
The theatricality of the pose of the protagonists is rendered with studied spontaneity. The girl’s blue silk satin robe draws attention; its shine recalls the best Venetian pictorial tradition, of which Hayez, born in Venice, was considered the last representative. The young man’s characteristic hat is worth considering: worn by Italian patriots, it suggests the political meaning of the painting linked to the Risorgimento.
The extraordinary nature of the work is achieved by the original interpretation that Hayez gives to a daily fact like a kiss between lovers. The setting is medieval, as indicated by the clothes and the original title (The kiss. Episode of youth. Costumes of the fourteenth century), but the ardor of the gesture is completely modern. This is not the simple triumph of youthful passion; the painting is in fact a symbol of those who must fight for the nascent nation, fragile as this love just blossomed, besieged by shadows offstage. The artist creates an authentic manifesto of the struggle for Italian independence, won even at the cost of the sacrifice of the deepest affections, for the good of the homeland.
Commissioned by Count Alfonso Maria Visconti who later donated it to the Pinacoteca, The Kiss was presented in 1859 at the Exhibition of the Brera Academy of Fine Arts three months after the triumphal entry into Milan of Vittorio Emanuele II and Napoleon III. The Second War of Independence had just ended, and Milan and Lombardy had been freed from Austrian rule.
Francesco Hayez was then almost seventy years old and was among the most celebrated masters of the time, the greatest exponent of historical Romanticism in painting.
Thanks to the success that immediately accompanied the painting, the prints that reproduced it multiplied, as shown by the work of Gerolamo Induno, Doleful premonition, exhibited in this room next to The Kiss. We are in 1862. In a humble room a girl looks at a miniature of her boyfriend. He left as a volunteer and she seems to feel that he will never return. Together with other symbols of the Risorgimento, in the room there is a reproduction of the now famous Kiss.
In the 20th century Hayez’s painting maintained its popularity, even if deprived of its historical meanings: it was mentioned in the film Senso by Luchino Visconti; inspired the image of the “al bacio” (perfect) lovers on the boxes of a famous brand of chocolates; and was the protagonist of reinterpretations by street artists and of parodies by cartoonists.
From a celebrated Risorgimento icon to an extraordinary pop icon: tangible proof of the inexhaustible vitality of this masterpiece.