AMBROSIANA, PINACOTECA. — The Ambrosiana Picture Gallery was established by Cardinal Federico Borromeo and attached to the library he founded. As soon as the library was established, Federico put into effect another of his plans: to create an Academy of Fine Arts, to which he would give as a support a rich and select collection of works of art for the formation and education of taste in that period. In fact, Federico established the Academy, appointing as its first president the painter Giov. Batt. Crespi, known as il Cerano, and placing at its disposal the picture gallery he had already assembled. He himself compiled a reasoned catalogue of it in the volume *Museum*, where he discusses with profound artistic insight the individual works offered for the use of the Academy, as he also did in *De pictura sacra*. It was a picture gallery rich in works by the most famous artists, such as Raphael, Leonardo and his pupils, Titian, Luini, Botticelli, Pinturicchio, Bergognone, Bramantino, Caravaggio, Dürer, Brueghel, and Brill. Among the architects, painters, and sculptors immediately enrolled in the Academy were such well-known figures as Andrea Biffi, il Mangone, il Buzzi, Leone Leoni, Ercole Procaccini, Daniele Crespi, Francesco Nuvoloni known as il Panfilo, as well as il Cerano himself, who was, among other things, the designer of the colossus of St. Charles Borromeo at Arona, which Federico also attached to the Ambrosiana. For the Academy, Federico had commissioned
In the second half of the 19th century, notable donations included those of Alessandro Galimberti, Lorenzo Balestrini, Marquis Litta Modignani, Duke Gallarati Scotti, and Duke Melzi d’Eril; in the 20th century, those of Luca Beltrami, banker Ponti, goldsmith Alfredo Ravasco, Lodovico Pogliaghi, who in 1937, while Pope Pius XI was still alive, transferred to the Ambrosiana the distinguished artistic complex of the Ludovicianum, which he had assembled in his splendid villa, converted into a museum and likewise donated to the Ambrosiana, on the Sacro Monte of Varese. The collection grew with paintings by Luini, works from the school of Giorgione, Schiavone, Serodine, an entire collection of Mosè Bianchi, Induno, thirty paintings by Londonio, through the donation of Countess Jeannette Dal Verme, Juan Bernasconi, Edoardo Silvestri, and Ambrogio Bertarelli. The musician Leone Sinigaglia contributed ceramics and the entire precious new hall of miniatures on ivory and parchment.
The collection includes the Settala Museum, assembled in the 17th century by the Milanese Manfredo Settala, known as the Milanese Archimedes and son of that Ludovico whom Manzoni depicted in his role as the archetypal director of public hygiene during the famous plague in Milan. It is a museum of the history of science, but it also contains art objects such as furniture, vases, worked glass, and ivories. It was added to the Ambrosiana in 1751, where it was initially placed in the library’s halls.
Attached to the Ambrosiana is a large collection of original drawings by famous artists, begun by Federico himself and later enriched through the efforts of patrons. We may mention the Resta Gallery, a sumptuous collection of drawings by famous artists, including Raphael, donated by Canon Count Resta of Milan; the collection of drawings by Dürer; and a collection of four thousand drawings by excellent artists donated by Marquis Federico Fagnani. Following the collection of original drawings is the great collection of engravings and prints, numbering about forty thousand pieces: no fewer than sixteen thousand of these were donated by Marquis Fagnani. The noble spirit of giving recently enriched the Ambrosiana with fine etchings, including works by Faruffini, Mosè Bianchi, Colombi-Borde, Pompeo Mariani, Uberto dell'Orto, Luigi Conconi, Luca Beltrami, Vittorio Grubicy de Dragon, Antonio Grandi, and Enrico Vegetti.
It is hardly necessary to recall the Codex Atlanticus by Leonardo da Vinci, which alone would suffice to constitute the glory of the Ambrosiana.
The art treasures thus accumulated remained until 1836 in two large ground-floor rooms, which Federico himself had built for the Academy on the site of the Taverna school adjacent to the already constructed library building. However, in that year, as the Ambrosian palace was enlarged, the Ambrosiana was placed with greater decorum in the upper halls on either side of the new structure, designed and completed by Moraglia, facing what was then Piazza della Rosa, thus creating a clearer distinction between the library and the Ambrosiana: the latter took up permanent residence on the upper floor, where since 1829 it had been awaiting, more organically, the collection of paintings, marbles, and bronzes donated by Count Edoardo de Pecis, for which a special hall had been constructed and decorated under the direction of Moraglia himself.
A reorganization of the Ambrosiana was carried out by Prefect Achille Ratti with the assistance of Luca Beltrami, Antonio Grandi, and the painter Luigi Cavenaghi in the years 1905–1906; this event was commemorated by an inscription on marble.
To execute casts of many Roman and Greek sculptures that were being discovered there, he also had to go to Rome. The definitive act of foundation was signed on 25 June 1625, with the stipulation of specific regulations and the establishment of an academy.
Some of these were dictated by Ratti himself. A few attempts at architectural expansion were made by Luigi Gramatica in 1923. But the Ambrosian Library acquired far greater breadth and splendor of form when, in 1928, Prefect Giovanni Galbiati definitively took possession of the Temple of the Holy Sepulchre and its adjoining buildings. That year, as it enabled extensive adaptations to the library, it also brought about a profound and radical reorganization of the entire artistic treasure housed in the Ambrosian Library, increasingly distinguishing the Library from the library proper. The seven traditional rooms of 1836 grew to thirty-seven, characterized by high nobility and beauty, partly situated in the old Moraglia building and partly along the airy two-tiered loggias of the sixteenth century that run along the Courtyard of the Fountains or Lapidary—also called the Courtyard of the Great Spirits for the monumental bronze statues of the universal geniuses of thought recently placed there to enhance the palace’s grandeur.
Among the rooms thus created, the following are noteworthy: the Engravings and Prints Room, the Dante Gallery, the Medusa Room, the Porcelain Room with its adjacent magnificent collection of miniatures, the Virgil Exedra, the Room of Niccolò da Bologna or the Bramantini Room, the Parinian Room, the German Room, the Flemish Room with its Brueghels, the Venetian Room or Titian Room, which also houses the famous cartoon of Raphael’s School of Athens, the Lombard and Italian Rooms, the Cinquecento Room or Luini Room with its fresco of the Crowning with Thorns, and lastly, the most imposing of all, the Leonardo Hall, which contains the Atlantic Codex with its two thousand original drawings, as well as, in an adjoining space, the other paintings and drawings by Leonardo owned by the Library, together with a collection of works by his pupils. This last hall, opened in June 1938, crowned the general reorganization of the Library, renewed during the five-year period from 1927 to 1932.
Following the Library is the Temple of the Holy Sep
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Ambrosiana, Pinacoteca — The Nativity, canvas by F. Barocci.
BROSIANA, PINACOTECA - Ecce Homo, by Titian.
Ambrosi, in a 17th-century transformation of the upper interior, with paintings by Panfilo and sculptures by De Fonduti and the great 11th-century crypt, later studied and reproduced in a planimetric drawing by Leonardo in the Ambrosian-Paris codex.
Like the library, which suffered severe damage to its entire building complex as a result of the Anglo-American bombings on the night of August 15–16, 1943, the pinacotheca was also, though to a lesser extent, riddled with bullets in almost all its rooms. However, all the artistic contents were saved because they had been promptly moved elsewhere, just as the library’s holdings were (except for a portion) also removed in time and placed in special shelters in the Lombardy and Piedmont regions. The restoration of the pinacotheca was completed in 1948, so that from that year onward it has shone again in its full splendor. The artworks are arranged according to the usual norms of museography, ordered by schools and periods; it is well known that the drawings and paintings, which form the precious collection, are predominantly Lombard-Venetian, from the 15th, 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries; nevertheless, other works, albeit in smaller numbers, belong to earlier and later periods and to other schools, especially German-Flemish. The prints, on the other hand, belong to the most diverse schools, both Italian and foreign. Raphael and Leonardo constitute the greatest treasures of the collection. - See Plate LXXXIII.
AMBROSIANA PINACOTECA
1920: G. Galbiati, Antichità Sudamericane del Museo Settala, in Atti del XXII Congresso Americanista, Rome 1926; id., Il tempio dei Crociati e degli Oblati, S. Sepolcro dell'A., Milan 1930; id., Come l'A. celebra il III Centenario di F. Borromeo, in Rendiconti del R. Istituto Lombardo di Scienze e Lettere, fasc. XIV (1931); id., Il Convegno degli Spiriti Magi, il Monumento a Goethe nell'A., Milan 1939; L. Grassi, Ricerche intorno al padre Resta e al suo codice di disegni all'A., in Rivista del Reale Istituto di Archeologia e Storia dell'Arte, fasc. II-III (1941).
1931-88: G. Morazzoni, Le miniature dell'A., Milan 1943; G. Galbiati, L'A. dopo la seconda guerra mondiale, Milan 1948; id., Itinerario per il visitatore della biblioteca e p. dell'A., Milan 1948.