This guided tour takes you on a journey to discover the most fascinating portraits in the Pinacoteca, illustrating the way this genre developed from the Renaissance to the 19th century. On show are works by the greatest Italian portraitists of all time, from Leonardo to Titian, Moroni, Fede Galizia, Appiani and Hayez, in a succession of well- and lesser-known figures, who documented the evolution of Italian society through the centuries.
At left, Portrait of a Man, Hans Muelich (1516-1573), 1548, oil on panel, 71 × 51 cm; at right, Portrait of Alessandro Negroni Prati, Francesco Hayez (1791-1882), 1853, oil on canvas, 120 × 94 cm
A significant part of the collection donated by Federico Borromeo to the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana consisted of portraits, together with religious subjects, landscapes and still lifes. Apart from those in the picture gallery, visitors should also remember the various portraits of illustrious individuals exhibited in the Library as the ideal complement to the collection of books and manuscripts, in a sort of map of the conquests of Western culture in the spiritual, intellectual, moral and artistic fields.
Today the portraits are an important part of the collection both by the number of works exhibited and the fame and quality of the paintings themselves. Outstanding among them is the Portrait of a Musician, the only one of Leonardo’s portraits painted in Milan still in the city.
The visit is completed with an overview of sculpted portraits through a viewing of the 19th-century busts and the sculptures in the Cortile degli Spiriti Magni.
We inform our the kind visitors of the Pinacoteca and scholars attending the Library's reading room that the Ambrosiana will be closed to the public from December 4 to 7 included.
The lectures will be grouped into three "knots":"Memory and Christianity, from Augustine to the Modern Age", "Memory in performative and missionary practices" and "Practices of Memory and Mission: from Europe to the Overseas Worlds".
The new Ambrosiana Digital Library was created with the aim of enhancing the main funds (inf., Sup., S.P. and Trotti) through digitization and public and free dissemination via the Internet.
The series of lectures Dante and Europe in the nineteenth century investigates the fortune of the Poet among leading figures of nineteenth-century European culture.
