Interior of Pinacoteca di Brera

The artwork depicts the three large Napoleonic salons of the Pinacoteca as they looked in the second half of the 19th century until the direction of Corrado Ricci (fig.1).

In the first room we recognize important paintings of the Lombard school: Bergognone’s St. Rocco on the right wall and Giovenone’s Madonna with Babino and Saints, Daniele Crespi’s Martyrdom of St. Stephen, Vermiglio’s Nativity Scene, Procaccini’s St. Jerome and St. Cecilia, a row of portraits by Daniele Crespi as well as Lomazzo’s Self-portrait; in the next room we see fifteenth-century altarpieces by Giacomo Francia, Giovanni Martini da Udine, and Ercole de’ Roberti while in the back room we glimpse the great sixteenth-century Venetian altarpieces.

The painting is made in oil on canvas with a technique for shaded spot backgrounds in line with the Scapigliatura style of painting. The canvas with orthogonal weave has a light preparation layering and is still mounted on the original wooden frame with a central crossbeam and expansion system by means of angle bolts (fig.2). The pictorial layers are marked by irregular mesh crazing generated by the loosening of the fabric (fig.3).

The painting has undergone two restorations: the first was in 1974 when the very dirty and torn canvas was cleaned, retouched, and varnished; on the back, the tear was repaired with a patch, and the canvas was re-tensioned by exerting pressure on the frame’s connecting rods (fig. 4).
In 2018, in anticipation of the painting’s exhibition in the museum’s first room, the work underwent another intervention. The restoration was necessary because the legibility of the work was reduced by the alteration of the varnishes that gave a yellow and uneven coloring to the surface (fig.5). The intervention was carried out through a gradual thinning of the resins present (fig.6) and completed by brush painting and pictorial integration of the small gaps with reversible varnish colors (fig.1). The canvas, which was again loose (fig.3), was re-tensioned through additional pressure on the connecting rods and reinserted into the frame.

The complexity of the intervention was mainly related to the different state of preservation of the various parts of the painting, so it was important to be able to preliminarily distinguish the original parts from the remake parts, especially on the left hand, landscape and face.

Numerous diagnostic techniques were then employed, including reflectography, infrared false color, ultraviolet fluorescence, radiography, X-fluorescence, colorimetric spectrometry in reflectance and some stratigraphic samples. From the intersection of the various results, it was possible to obtain a significant picture of the execution technique and the state of conservation of the work.