AMBROSIAN, PINACOTHECA. - The Ambrosiana Picture Gallery was established by Cardinal Federico Borromeo and attached to the library he founded. As soon as the library had come into being, Federico carried out another of his plans: that of also founding an Academy of Fine Arts, to which he would give as an aid an abundant and choice collection of works of art for the formation and education of taste in that era. In fact Federico established the Academy, giving it as its first president the painter Giovanni Battista Crespi, known as il Cerano, and placing at its disposal the picture gallery he had already assembled and of which he himself composed a reasoned catalogue in the volume Museum, where he discusses with profound artistic sensibility the individual works offered for the use of the Academy, as he also did in the De pictura sacra. It was a picture gallery rich in works by the most celebrated artists, such as Raphael, Leonardo and his pupils, Titian, Luini, Botticelli, Pinturicchio, Bergognone, Bramantino, Caravaggio, Dürer, Brueghel, Brill. Architects, painters and sculptors of great renown were immediately enrolled in the Academy, such 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 author of the design for the colossus of S. Carlone at Arona, which Federico also aggregated to the Ambrosiana. For the Academy Federico had had to have the casts made in Rome of many Roman and Greek sculptures that were being discovered there. The definitive act of foundation dates from 25 June 1625, with the prescription of specific regulations and the establishment of an academic body which, together with the prefect of the Library and a doctor, was to direct the ingenious institution. But the Academy, flourishing at the outset, later declined; so much so that in 1775 it ceased to exist, while Maria Theresa founded the Academy of Fine Arts in the Palazzo di Brera, recently vacated by the Jesuits. A memory of Federico's Academy has nevertheless remained in the fact that the A. still keeps today a representative of that institution, still designating him as a member of the Academy, chosen from among scholars or experts in art.
There remained, however, and developed ever better, the p. which Federico had already thought of in 1607 and 1611, perfecting his intention in this regard with a document of 1618, by which the p. was decisively constituted and the very premises of the Academy were entrusted to it.
Like Federico's library, the p. also grew through new acquisitions and donations. Flaminio Pasqualini and the abbot Piatti made donations in that same century. The most important donations, however, are from the first half of the 19th century, such as that of Edoardo de Pecis and Maria de Pecis Parravicino, that of Federico Fagnani, of Gaudenzio di Pagave, of Felice Donzelli, of Countess Teresa Dugnani, of G. B. Bonsignori, formerly a doctor of the A. and later bishop of Faenza, of Antonio Ronchetti, of Baron Pietro Custodi, of Carlo and Giuseppe Casati.
In the second half of the 19th century, mention is made of the donations of Alessandro Galimberti, of Lorenzo Balestrini, of the Marquis Litta Modignani, of the Duke Gallarati Scotti, of the Duke Melzi d'Eril; in the 20th century, those of Luca Beltrami, of the banker Ponti, of the goldsmith Alfredo Ravasco, of Lodovico Pogliaghi, who by an act of 1937, while Pope Pius XI was still living, transmitted to the A. the distinguished artistic complex of the Ludovicianum, assembled by himself in his splendid villa arranged as a museum, itself also donated to the A., on the Sacro Monte of Varese. The p. was enriched with paintings by Luini, by the school of Giorgione, by Schiavone, by Serodine, with an entire collection of Mosè Bianchi, of Induno, with thirty paintings by Londonio, through the donation of Countess Jeannette Dal Verme, of Juan Bernasconi, of Edoardo Silvestri and of Ambrogio Bertarelli. The musician Leone Sinigaglia provided ceramics and the whole precious new room of miniatures on ivory and on parchment.
Part of the p. is the Settala museum, already assembled in the 17th century by the Milanese Manfredo Settala, called the Milanese Archimedes and son of that Ludovico whom Manzoni illustrated in his capacity and function of protofisico, or chief director of public hygiene, at the time of 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, ivories. It was added to the A. in 1751, where it was first placed in the rooms of the library.
Annexed to the p. is an ample collection of original drawings by celebrated authors, already begun by Federico himself and later enriched through the work of patrons. We may mention the Resta gallery, a sumptuous collection of drawings by celebrated authors, including Raphael, donated by Canon Count Resta of Milan; the collection of drawings by Dürer and a collection of four thousand drawings by excellent authors donated by the Marquis Federico Fagnani. The collection of original drawings is followed by the great collection of engravings and prints of about 40,000 pieces: fully 16,000 from the donation of the Marquis Fagnani. The noble rivalry in giving recently enriched the A. with beautiful etchings: we may cite those of Faruffini, of Mosè Bianchi, Colombi-Borde, Pompeo Mariani, Uberto dell'Orto, Luigi Conconi, Luca Beltrami, Vittorio Grubicy de Dragon, Antonio Grandi, Enrico Vegetti.
It scarcely needs to be recalled that Leonardo da Vinci's Atlantic Codex alone would suffice to constitute the glory of the A.
The art treasures thus accumulated remained until 1836 placed in two large ground-floor rooms, which Federico himself had had built for the Academy on the area of the Taverna school, adjacent to the palace of the library already constructed. But, when the Ambrosian palace was enlarged in that year, the p. was placed with greater dignity in the upper rooms of the two sides of the new building erected and corrected by Moraglia, with its front facing what was then the Piazza della Rosa, thus creating a clearer distinction between library and p.: the latter took up a permanent seat on the upper floor, where already since 1829 the collection of paintings, marbles and bronzes donated by Count Edoardo de Pecis awaited it, in order to be joined more organically, for which a special room had been built and decorated under the direction of Moraglia himself.
A reorganization of the p. was carried out by the prefect Achille Ratti with the collaboration of Luca Beltrami, of Antonio Grandi and of the painter Luigi Cavenaghi in the years 1905-1906; an event consecrated by an inscription on marble dictated by Ratti himself. Some attempt at building expansion was made by Luigi Gramatica in 1923. But the p. A. acquired far broader scope and splendor of form when in 1928, with Giovanni Galbiati as prefect, it entered into definitive possession of the temple of the S. Sepolcro and its adjoining buildings. This annexation, just as it made extensive adaptations possible for the library, likewise determined a profound and radical rearrangement of all the artistic treasure assembled in the p. A., increasingly distinguishing the p. from the library. The seven traditional rooms of 1836 rose to thirty-seven, informed by high nobility and beauty, arranged partly in the rooms of the old Moraglia building and partly along the airy 16th-century two-tier loggias running around the courtyard of the fountains, or lapidary courtyard, called that of the Spiriti Magni for the monumental bronze statues of the universal geniuses of thought recently placed there as a suggestive adornment of the palace. Among the rooms thus constituted we may cite the following: the room of engravings and prints, the Dantesque gallery, the room of the Medusa, that of the porcelains with the adjoining magnificent collection of miniatures, the Virgilian exedra, the room of Niccolò da Bologna or of the Bramantini, the Parinian room, the room of the Germans, the room of the Flemish with the Brueghels, the Venetian room or room of Titian, with there also the celebrated cartoon of Raphael's School of Athens, the Lombard and Italian rooms, the room of the Cinquecento or of Luini with the fresco of the Coronation of Thorns, and, lastly, the most imposing of all, the Leonardo hall, where the Atlantic Codex stands with its 2,000 original drawings as well as, in the adjoining room, the other paintings and drawings by the same author owned by the A., together with the collection of works by his pupils. This last room, opened in June 1938, crowned the general rearrangement of the A. renewed in the five-year period 1925-32.
The p. is followed by the temple of the S. Se-
of the Holy Sepulchre, in its 17th-century transformation in the upper interior part, with paintings by Panfilo and plastic works by De Fonduti and with the great 11th-century crypt, later studied and reproduced in a planimetric drawing by Leonardo in the Ambrosian-Parisian codex.
Like the library, which had to suffer serious damage in its building complex as a result of the Anglo-American bombings of the night of 15-16 Aug. 1943, so too the p. was, although to a lesser extent, riddled by shells in almost all its rooms. But all the artistic contents were saved because they were promptly transported elsewhere, just as the book heritage was saved (except for a part), likewise removed in time and placed in special shelters in the Lombard and Piedmontese region. The restoration of the p. has been complete since 1948, so that from this year it shines again in its full beauty. The works of art are arranged there according to the usual norms of museography, that is, ordered by schools and by periods; it is known that the drawings and paintings, which form the precious collection, are predominantly Lombard-Venetian, of the 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th centuries; nevertheless other works, albeit less abundantly, 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, Italian and foreign. Raphael and Leonardo constitute the greatest treasure of the collection. - See Pl. LXXXIII.
Bibliography6 works
1920; G. Galbiati, Antichità Sudamericane del Museo Settola, in Atti del XXII Congresso Americanista, Rome 1926; id., Il tempio dei Crociati e degli Oblati, S. Sappiero 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. XI-XV (1931); id., Il Convegno degli Spiriti Magni, 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), pp. 151-88; 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.