Neoclassical Milan breathes again inside the Gallerie d’Italia, where Intesa Sanpaolo inaugurates an exhibition that brings into dialogue the two cities which, between the late eighteenth century and the Napoleonic era, shaped the language of modernity while looking to antiquity as a model of rigor and grandeur. The exhibition brings together more than one hundred works from international museums and collections, weaving a narrative that spans sculpture, painting, drawing, and decorative arts. Among its protagonists, Antonio Canova commands the entrance with the monumental Cavallo Colossale, a masterpiece that survived centuries of neglect and has been reassembled from two hundred fragments after a remarkable restoration. Its elegant, dynamic mass evokes the unrealized ambition of an equestrian monument to Napoleon, later becoming a symbol of an Italy in transition. Beside him, the intellectual world of Giuseppe Bossi emerges through paintings, drawings, and documents that recount the Milan of Brera, of enlightened salons, of academies. His dialogue with Canova helped define a national idea of beauty grounded in classical proportion. The exhibition also includes urban visions such as Giovanni Antonio Antolini’s Foro Bonaparte project - an architectural utopia that never left the drawing board but profoundly influenced Milan’s urban imagination - and emblematic objects of Napoleonic Italy, from the Honours of Italy to Andrea Appiani’s powerful Portrait of Napoleon as King of Italy.
Rome and Milan thus appear as complementary poles: the first guardian of ancient eternity, the second a forge of modernity. In dialogue with the concurrent retrospective at Palazzo Reale, Eternal and Visionary restores a decisive chapter of European cultural history, where classical heritage becomes the engine of a new way of imagining art, nation, and future.
