The exhibition curated by Marco Carminati, Fernando Mazzocca, Alessandro Morandotti and Paola Zatti presents 140 works among paintings, marbles, manuscripts, drawings, sculptures, coming from the collections and deposits of Milanese museums and from national and international museums such as the Mart in Rovereto, the Gallerie dell'Accademia in Venice, the Galleria Borghese in Rome, the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, as well as from foundations, private collections and the Intesa Sanpaolo collection.
The exhibition itinerary, organised into 10 thematic and chronological sections, part from the Middle Ages, when the activity of the large construction site of the Duomo was led by German workers, until the twentieth century, when a system of galleries and exhibitions unique in Italy and of international scope attracted great personalities from all over the world to the Lombard capital with new ideas, decisive for updating the taste, local traditions and artistic reality of Milan.
A section of the exhibition is dedicated to the patron and collector Cardinal Federico Borromeo who brought, in a city open to international trade and exchange, the passion for Flemish painting and the new genres of landscape and still life. The works, often small in format and painted on precious wood and copper supports, are displayed in overlapping rows, according to the typical taste of the time.
Milan with Venice and the relationship between artists excel in Europe in the first half of the eighteenth century
They are the painters like Sebastiano Ricci and Giambattista Tiepolo were welcomed in the capital of the Duchy at different times, between the last years of the seventeenth century and the thirties and forties of the new century, and their works opened new horizons allowing the updating of local masters in both the mythological and sacred genres.
Furthermore, it will be possible to delve into an important page of Milanese history, that of the great architect Giuseppe Piermarini, which radically renewed the city by building new palaces for the nobility and the emerging bourgeoisie and by carrying out decisive interventions in the urban fabric, which transformed Milan into a modern metropolis. From Palazzo Belgiojoso to the Villa Reale in Monza, from the Teatro alla Scala to the Giardini Pubblici, the images of the new neoclassical Milan parade.
Furthermore, the exhibition does not lack ambitious painters and sculptors such as Pelagio Palagi, Francesco Hayez, Massimo d'Azeglio, Carlo Canella, Alessandro Puttinati but also Giuseppe Molteni, Giovanni Migliara and Angelo Inganni and finally the Venetian Margherita Sarfatti with other 900th century authors such as Mario Sironi, Achille Funi, Arturo Martini and Francesco Messina.
Wildt and his students Fontana and Melotti
The tenth and final section develops the singular relationship that linked the eccentric sculptor Adolfo Wildt to his two young students at the Brera Academy, Lucio Fontana and Fausto Melotti.
The exhibition, with a strong identity character for the city of Milan, is created under the High Patronage of the President of the Republic e in partnership with the Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana, and sees the collaboration of the most important cultural institutions in Milan, such as the Veneranda Fabbrica del Duomo, the Diocesan Museum, the Brera Art Gallery, the Sforza Castle, the Poldi Pezzoli Museum, the Braidense National Library, the GAM, the Museum of the Twentieth Century, the National Museum of Science and Technology, many of which will organize initiatives in dialogue with the Gallerie d'Italia in the coming months.
John Bazoli, President Emeritus of Intesa Sanpaolo, states: “The Gallerie d'Italia are hosting a major exhibition project that we could call "identity-based", because it offers the public, both Milanese and non-Milanese, the opportunity to reflect on the cultural history of the city and its extraordinary ability, unchanged over the centuries, to welcome foreign artists, taking on board their innovations. A tribute therefore to Milan as a crossroads of the arts, as an inclusive and cosmopolitan city, to whose creation prestigious city entities have contributed, first of all the Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana, as well as important national and international museums. It is precisely the climate of profound collaboration that has made it possible to propose an exhibition of particular beauty and quality, which testifies to the strong and historic bond of Intesa Sanpaolo with the city, its institutions and its community."
