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 name 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 personal 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, namely 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
fairyland for his pale, perfect Madonnas, hermetically sealed from
the realities of time and decay.
The rooms that follow hold yet more quality 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".