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.
Created to enhance the museum’s collections, the exhibition displays a collection of “exotic” artefacts brought from different parts of the world by Milanese citizens, enthusiasts, businessmen, travellers, researchers.
The exhibition recounts Leonora Carrington's lifelong relationship with Italy, from her discovery of Italian art in Florence to exploring her affiliation with Surrealism. The exhibition features not only her wonderful paintings but also photographs, books from her personal library and archive material.
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 Restorations of the Gasparoli Family in the Lens of Marco Introini
The exhibition presents 30 shots by a leading architectural photographer that tell the story of some of Gasparoli’s interventions carried out in Milan on religious and public buildings, private homes and monuments.
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