Pinacoteca di Brera, Image from the exhibition <em>First dialogue, Raphael and Perugino around two Marriages of the Virgin</em>, 2016 | Courtesy of Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan<br />
Raphael was only 21 when he painted his first masterpiece. The Sposalizio della Vergine came to light in Città di Castello, just before Raffaello took off on a triumphal tour of all the cultural hotspots of central Italy. Later on, with little adieu, an officer of Napoleon would remove the altarpiece from the church for which it was painted, selling it for quite a price in Milan where, today, it is one of the jewels of the Collection of the Pinacoteca of Brera. Elegant, harmonious and mathematically perfect, the altarpiece of the Sposalizio shows all the distinctive trademarks of the Renaissance that Raphael ruled. But at the time, it was a sensation for another reason - the young artist was obscuring his Master Pietro Perugino’s fame, whose brush was lauded with successes from Umbria to Florence to Rome. The first to point this out was the great Giorgio Vasari who compared the respective versions of the Sposalizio della Vergine painted by the two artists. In the work of Raphael, he notices a new, warm naturalness, capable of intertwining both figure and background, invention and tradition, a marvel of perspective and the mysteries of life itself. Beside the admirable holy scene in the foreground, the artist renders a sacred idea of the universe and creation itself, “not as nature has made but as it should have made it.”
Galtrucco, the Fabrics that enchanted the Women of the Twentieth Century
The exhibition aims to revive the years of activity of the historic Milanese fabric shop, through a narrative path that begins in the 1920s, followed by dark historical events such as the Second World War, but also by the economic recovery of the 1960s up to the beginning of the new millennium.
The Humanitarian Question Through Alessandro Grassani's Lens
Alessandro Grassani's photographs push us to open our eyes to facts that are too often forgotten, and above all they recall the sense of responsibility of each of us, asking us not to remain indifferent.
Neshat creates highly lyrical narratives, as well as politically charged visions, that question issues of power, religion, race, and the relationships between past and present, East and West, individual and collective.