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.”
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.
A major retrospective exhibition, with over 300 original photographic works including vintage and period prints, documents and archive materials dedicated to the gentle genius of Italian photography - Mario Giacomelli - on the occasion of the centenary of his birth.
135 years after her birth, the Diocesan Museum of Milan recounts the peak of Dorothea Lange’s career, when between the 1930s and 1940s the American photographer bore witness to the dramatic current events in the United States.