Italy Travel And Hotel Guide

North of La Scala, Via Brera sets the tone for the city’s arty quarter with its small galleries and art shops. There’s nothing resembling an artist’s garret, however: Via Brera and the streets around it are the terrain of the rich, reflected in the café prices and designer styles of those who can afford to sit outside them. The Brera district gives its study to Milan’s most prestigious art gallery, the Pinacoteca di Brera at Via Brera 28 (Tues-Fri & Sun 8.30am-7.30pm, Sat 8.30am- 11pm; L12,000/¬6.20), originally set up by Napoleon, who filled the building with works looted from the churches and aristocratic collections of French-occupied Italy, opening the museum to the public in 1809. It’s a fine gallery, Milan’s best by far, but it’s also very large, and unless you’re keen on making several exhaustive visits you need to be very selective, dipping into the collection guided by your own individualized tastes.

Not surprisingly, most of the museum’s paintings are Italian and predate the twentieth century. The Brera does display modern work, including paintings by Modigliani, De Chirico and Carrà, but it’s the Renaissance which provides the museum’s core. There’s a good representation of Venetian painters - works by Bonifacio and, a century later, Paolo Veronese, the latter weighing in with a depiction of Supper in the House of Simon which got him into trouble with the Inquisition, who considered the introduction of frolicking animals and unruly kids unsuitable subject matter for a religious painting. Tintoretto’s Deposition was more starkly in tune with requirements of the time, a scene of intense concentration and grief over Christ’s body, painted in the 1560s. Gentile Bellini’s St Mark Preaching in St Euphemia Square introduces an exotic note, the square bustling with turbaned men, veiled women, camels and even a giraffe. There are also paintings by Gentile’s follower, Carpaccio, videlicet The Presentation of the Virgin and The Disputation of St Stephen , while the Pietà by Gentile’s more talented brother, Giovanni, has been deemed “one of the most moving paintings in the history of art”.

Look out also for The Dead Christ , a painting by Giovanni Bellini’s brother-in-law, Mantegna: it’s an exercise in virtuosity really, but an ingenious one - Christ, lying on a wooden slab, viewed from the wrinkled and pierced soles of his feet upwards. Although he was a contemporary of Mantegna, Crivelli’s work, nearby, is quite different, his paintings creating a phantasy for his pale, perfect Madonnas, hermetically sealed from the realities of time and decay.

The rooms that follow hold yet more calibre work, of which Piero della Francesca’s chill Madonna with Angels , SS and Federigo da Montefeltro is the most famous painting. But take a look too at Raphael’s Marriage of the Virgin , whose lucid, languid Renaissance mood is in sharp contrast to the grim realism of Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus - set in a dark tavern and painted a century later. Less well known but equally realistic are the paintings of Lombardy’s brilliant eighteenth-century realist, Ceruti - known as Il Pitochetto (The Little Beggar) for his unfashionable sympathy with the poor, who stare out with reproachful dignity from his canvases. As his main champion, Roberto Longhi, said, his figures are “dangerously larger than life”, not easily transformed into “gay drawing room ornaments”.

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