2020 is the year in which the 500th anniversary of the death of Raffaello Sanzio, the artist from Urbino, is commemorated, one of the Italian Renaissance’s greatest artists. Perhaps only very few know that Milan hosts a treasure that is unique in all the world. It was 1508 when Raphael came to Rome, called upon to create frescoes in the private apartments in the Vatican of Pope Julius II, just a few metres from the Sistine Chapel, where Michelangelo was working at the time. In the Stanza della Segnatura, Raphael painted The Athen’s School, which depicts famed philosophers and mathematicians of the ancient world, from Plato to Aristotle, intently speaking together. To create the celebrated painting, Raphael created a 1:1 scale drawing on paper, hardly realising that his masterpiece would cross the confines of the centuries. Already at the start of the 1600s, the sketch of The Athen’s School was sought after by Cardinal Federico Borromeo who was first able to have the work on loan and then was able to buy it for a large sum of money, about the equivalent of 600 liras at the time. At the end of the XVIII Century, the sketch was taken by Napoleon who brought it to the Louvre in Paris where it was restored. In 1815, after Waterloo, thanks to the efforts of another famous artist - Antonio Canova - the original sketch of The Athen’s School returned to Italy and became part of the collection of the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana of Milan.
Eyes in Dialogue: Berengo Gardin and Ramistella at Leica Galerie
At Leica Galerie Milan, the works of Gianni Berengo Gardin and Roselena Ramistella create a cross-generational dialogue, part of the 100th anniversary of the Leica I, the first compact 35mm film camera.
Jago at the Biblioteca Ambrosiana: A Still Life Loaded with Weapons
The artist presents a marble sculpture in dialogue with Caravaggio’s famous Basket of Fruit: a basket filled with weapons that reflects on contemporary violence and the fragility of existence.
On display are ten large-scale paintings from the NADA series, created between 1999 and 2025. The first works in this series were born from the artist’s explicit desire to erase the image of the crucifixion in an attempt to experiment, to use Thierry De Cordier’s words, with the “greatness of nothingness”.
Survey of Photography in Germany in the Twentieth Century
An exhibition that follows a typological and not chronological order, bringing together over 600 photographic works by 25 artists essential to reconstructing the history of photography in Germany in the twentieth century.