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Enhancement of the works of the Pinacoteca di Brera on deposit in the churches of the Diocese of Milan.
Project in collaboration with the Cultural Heritage Office of the Diocese of Milan.

Napoleonic requisitions allocated to the Pinacoteca di Brera a quantity of large-format works that could not be displayed in the museum. A solution devised by Andrea Appiani, coeval with the first inventory, was to allocate them to the so-called “poor churches,” lacking furnishings for daily devotion and the decoration of sacred rooms. The Lombardy parishes gladly accepted the offer. The works thus regained their original function, creating a typical and specific case of storage for the Pinacoteca di Brera. The history of these works is still often unknown. The idea has become of great modernity, if one considers that American museology has created the category of “open storage,” visible storage.
Altars and frames have sometimes been built around these works to permanently adapt them to their new surroundings.
Given that the relationship with the territory for the museum is essential and decisive for its very subsistence, since 2015 the Art Gallery has focused on strengthening this link by involving the citizenship. This is the origin of the present project, which is part of We need a whole city, a container of initiatives that aim to involve special audiences and suburbs.
On May 17, 2023, said project was launched in Paderno Dugnano, in close sharing with the Parish and the Cultural Heritage Office of the Diocese of Milan. This is an opportunity for the Pinacoteca to fulfill its mission as a public museum. The project involves the creation of captions accompanied by texts on the model of those in the Pinacoteca. And it is not just a matter of affixing art-historical captions, but of highlighting religious, anthropological and social meanings. For this, QR Codes have been added that link to additional content, by the cooperating entities. This comes at a time when the Pinacoteca is also receiving biased requests from depository institutions to affix captions to the paintings that they preserve.

The particular history of the works
of the Pinacoteca di Brera in external storage

Relative to Brera, the problem of being able to exhibit only a few works in the halls is well-known and original, mainly due to the lack of space, which Carlo Bertelli called “the real tyrant of Brera.” Brera has over time increased its holdings through exchanges, bequests, donations, and purchases. The museum deposits have been the subject of valorization and investigation in international culture for some thirty years. This interest is motivated by the fact that said works are indispensable in defining the museum’s identity, the formation of its collections and the changes in society’s taste.
Brera, a national museum, houses collections of various origins and nature of more than 1,700 paintings. Its storerooms have a wide spatial displacement: from the church of San Marco, next to the Pinacoteca, to the distant Italian Embassy in Buenos Aires. Numerous public and private institutions house the works in Milan city, as well as churches, palaces and museums in Lombardy, Emilia and Marche, the main government and institutional offices in Rome and our Diplomatic Seats abroad. The first early phase of external repositories, for which Napoleonic officials were responsible, occurred in the 1820s; the second phase occurred in the 1840s and the third in the 1920s; subsequent initiatives date from the 1940s and the postwar period. Sporadic cases of new repositories concern the present day.
It was impossible for nineteenth-century officials-when there were no conservation laws involving the church-to control hundreds of outside works far exceeding in quantity those displayed in the rooms of the Pinacoteca. Among the Directors of the Pinacoteca Bertini, Carotti and later Modigliani, Wittgens and Dell’Acqua understood the need to perform acts of protection on this portion of the heritage that had remained in the shadows.
The importance of the repositories is central in that they tell the story of the museum.
The present project makes an important area of the collections accessible; it thematizes and reactualizes, as its own specificity, the sacred and devotional dimension; it places at the base the recovery of the historical dimension lived in a community dimension, establishing a specific way of understanding the center-periphery relationship.

Below is the list of churches and institutions that have joined the project and the relevant art-historical records of the works.

Chiesa di Santa Maria Nascente
Paderno Dugnano (MI)

No document has been found in the historical archives attesting to a specific request sent by the curate to have, on deposit at his church, some paintings from the Brera Academy; but it is certain that Don Giovanni Battista Tosetti, parish priest in Santa Maria Nascente from 1813 to 1823, must have forwarded a request, because it is documented that on July 2, 1821 The Royal Academy of Brera granted two paintings on deposit at the parish of Paderno.

The first painting; a canvas 314 cm high and 153 cm wide, depicting The Assumption of the Virgin is a work attributed to the 17th-century Venetian school and catalogued under number 788 in the Napoleonic inventory.
The second painting; a canvas 285 cm high and 125 cm wide, depicting The Madonna Adored by St. James is a work attributed to Palma the Younger and catalogued under number 887 in the Napoleonic inventory.

Another 21 years passed and a good five more were needed to complete the procedure that made it possible to bring all the canvases owned by the Pinacoteca di Brera to the church in Paderno, paintings that can still be seen today inside the chancel of the high altar and on the side aisles.
It was in fact 1842 and Don Luigi Tosi, parish priest in Santa Maria Nascente in Paderno, who succeeded Don Giovanni Battista Tosetti, learned that the illustrious Brera Academy in Milan had many paintings on deposit in its warehouses, which could be entrusted to the churches, since they depicted figures of Saints and Martyrs or Sacred scenes from the Old and New Testaments.
The paintings could be granted on deposit, to the parish churches that requested them, with the twofold purpose of valorizing them, but above all of removing them from the dust of the underground storerooms in which they lay, inside the Milanese Pinacoteca.
So it was that Don Luigi, taking advantage of the occasion and not least with the intention of enhancing the ancient Temple of Paderno, which was looking somewhat bare and recently enlarged, applied to the Royal Government to have some of these paintings in charge, chosen from among those that could best fit the walls of the church.
However, the request was unsuccessful; the then President of the Academy, Mr. Londonio, did not agree to the transfer of the works.
In 1846 Mr. Bellotti succeeded to the presidency of the Academy, Don Luigi Tosi took the opportunity to again forward a second request to the Royal Government with the hope of obtaining two large paintings and two others somewhat smaller, also giving indicative dimensions of those most suitable for the purpose.

On December 31 of the same year, with an official document registered under number 817, the Brera Academy agreed to the request, inviting the parish priest to go to the facility in Milan to choose the works deemed most suitable for its context.
In Don Luigi’s handwritten account, we read that the choice was not easy because many works lay within the warehouses and in some cases not even well preserved. His eye fell on two paintings, which because of their size could fit well on the bare walls of the church.

The first painting depicted the “Sacrifice of Abraham,” marked with the number 664, and the second painting “The Fall of St. Paul,” marked with the number 663. Little importance could have been attached to the artist who made them, but not by unexpected luck were those very paintings chosen that bore the inscription “LUINOS” on the back. In fact, the astute Padernese parish priest, even before going to the Academy, had been informed about the presence of these two important canvases, attributable precisely to Bernardino Luini or his school.

The search continued later to locate the two smaller canvases, and among the many viewed were chosen: a “Nativity” marked on the list with the number 643 and a “Resurrection” marked with the number 644, both attributable to the painter Giulio Romano.
With surprise, it was learned that all the canvases had been lying in Brera storage since 1811, and that the smaller paintings came from Mantua.
On January 18, 1847, the Regia Accademia di Brera by deed No. 35 officially granted the above four canvases on deposit to the parish church of Santa Maria Nascente in Paderno Milanese.
(The two smaller canvases were returned in 2005 to be displayed in the Ducal Palace in Mantua where they are still located).
The parish community reciprocated the favor, granted by the Academy, by donating to the parish priest the offerings needed for the restoration. The paintings appeared to be in a poor state of preservation and, before hanging, had to be cleaned, lined and framed.
The repair work was entrusted to restorer Rapesi who was awarded the sum of L. 695.12.
Still today, as then, the canvases adorn the walls of our church, which in the meantime has been rebuilt anew, with such majesty as to make it appear almost basilican; still today, as then, the people of Padernia admire the magnificence of the works, read in them the Gospel and biblical passages, unknowingly participating in an illustrated catechesis; still today, as then, they love and feel their own those paintings that have accompanied sad moments and joyful ones, solemn and ordinary rites, in short, the whole religious life of our parish community that is alive and energetic for 2 centuries now.
The hope is that more centuries may pass, with the hope and awareness that those works of art can also transfer to future generations all those wonderful emotions and moments of reflection that they have given us so far.

Text by Enzo Stucchi
(Parrocchia di Santa Maria Nascente)