On Milan's great painting collection — the Bramante courtyard, the Mantegna room, and the particular quality of a museum that arrived before the neighbourhood became desirable
The Pinacoteca di Brera occupies the upper floor of a building that was, successively, a monastery, a Jesuit college, and a Napoleonic administrative complex. The collection was assembled by imperial decree after 1797. It arrived before the neighbourhood.
The Pinacoteca di Brera occupies the upper floor of a building that was, successively, a monastery, a Jesuit college, and a Napoleonic administrative complex. The courtyard below — Bramante's double-loggia design for the College of Santa Maria delle Grazie, begun in 1485 and not completed for another century — is one of the most considered outdoor spaces in Milan, which is a city with several serious competitors for that description. A bronze Napoleon, surveying the courtyard he ultimately caused to be filled with art requisitioned from the territories he occupied, stands at the centre.
The collection arrived before the neighbourhood became what it is. The Pinacoteca was established in 1809 as Napoleon's museum of the Italian provinces — a systematic gathering of paintings from suppressed monasteries, churches, and noble collections across Lombardy and the Veneto. By the time Brera became fashionable in the latter decades of the twentieth century, the museum had been operating for over a hundred and fifty years. The neighbourhood organised itself around the institution rather than the reverse, which gives the Pinacoteca a relationship to Brera that the neighbourhood's cafés and galleries do not share: it was here first.
The Mantegna room is the reason most serious visitors come. The Dead Christ — painted around 1480 and not displayed publicly until after Mantegna's death — is a foreshortening exercise that resolved a problem Renaissance painters had been working on for a generation and that no subsequent artist attempted to improve upon, correctly judging improvement impossible. The room contains several other works of consequence, but the Dead Christ organises the space around itself. You find yourself returning to it after having moved on, which is the test of a painting.
The Raphael Marriage of the Virgin, acquired from the church of San Francesco in Città di Castello, arrived in Brera in 1806 and established the collection's ambition at the beginning. The painting is as formally composed as Raphael's work always is, and the compositional logic — the temple in the background, the figures arranged in the foreground in precise spatial relationship to each other — rewards sustained attention rather than the brief encounter that the crowds at more famous Raphaels typically permit. In Brera, the room is usually manageable.
The Pinacoteca asks for time in the way that any collection assembled by conquest asks for time — the works are here for reasons that have nothing to do with their original contexts, and understanding where they came from and why they left is part of reading them correctly. The catalogue is useful for this. The rooms are arranged chronologically and by region, which means the Lombard works and the Venetian works exist in productive proximity to each other, demonstrating what the same painterly problems looked like when solved in different cities by painters working in different traditions.