This article is part of FT Globetrotter’s guide to Milan
Located in the neoclassical Palazzo Brera, around a beautiful double-columned courtyard (home to sculptures and an appealing café), the Pinacoteca di Brera was established by Napoleon and opened on his birthday, August 15, in 1809. Its superb core Italian Renaissance collection was built around paintings plundered from churches — including Raphael’s “Marriage of the Virgin” and Piero della Francesca’s “Madonna and Child” — during the emperor’s religious suppressions.
Splendid, airy galleries, including monumental altarpieces in the Napoleonic Halls, are laid out more or less chronologically and invite in-depth exploration of this period, especially the Lombard and Venetian schools. Although the Renaissance remains the museum’s greatest strength, also appealing are the modern works — the late to mid-20th century — donated by Emilo and Maria Jesi and housed at the extension next door, Palazzo Citterio (opened in December 2024), as an expansion of the “Grande Brera” complex. Throughout, the Brera is gracious, ample, full of surprises and rarely crowded: an oasis of contemplative pleasure in frenetic Milan.
1. ‘Camerino Triptych’ (1482) by Carlo Crivelli
In a gallery of gleaming, gilded altarpieces, Crivelli’s “Madonna and Child” flanked by life-size saints leaps out like a modern mixed-media interloper, so playful are the games of illusion, flatness versus sculptural rendering, and ornamental profusion. On the left, St Peter dominates, his huge dangling keys in gesso and metal appliqué jutting fantastically into our space. On the right, Peter Martyr stands firm despite the dagger stuck into his chest and the sword cleaving his skull. A handsome worldly youth, Camerino’s teenage patron saint Venantius, hair bobbed in courtly Sforza fashion, holds up an exquisite model of the Apennine town. Room XXII
2. ‘Lamentation over the Dead Christ’ (c1483) by Andrea Mantegna
The expressive force of Christ’s extremely foreshortened body is so intense that this painting can’t share a wall with anything else. It hangs alone on a panel in the centre of the room, at once intimate and estranging — not even the wracked mourners to the side of Christ, their faces grey with grief, dare touch the body. The severity, the insistence on the absoluteness and aloneness of death, a cold corpse with stiffened flesh laid out on a marble slab, offering no suggestion of redemption, shocked in the 15th century and is unforgettable now. Room VI
3. ‘St Mark Preaching in Alexandria’ (1504-7) by Gentile and Giovanni Bellini
The Bellinis were nearly 80 when the older brother Gentile died, leaving incomplete his enormous (7.7-metre-wide) extravaganza depicting Venice’s patron saint declaiming to turbaned and veiled Muslims, lavishly attired Venetians, a camel and a giraffe. His will demanded that the reluctant Giovanni finish the canvas. Gentile devised the fabulous stage-like composition, converging obelisks, minarets and eastern buildings with St Mark’s Basilica in Venice. Giovanni is thought to have brought animation and interest to the figures. Room VIII
4. ‘Discovery of the Body of St Mark’ (1562-6) by Tintoretto
Tintoretto’s monumental, mysterious painting set in a cemetery — a dizzyingly recessive, tomb-lined arcade, the darkness pierced by flashes of unnatural light — grabs the eye and never lets it rest. Time and space collapse: simultaneously illuminated are the Venetians seeking Mark’s corpse, the ghostly pale body (foreshortened following Mantegna’s invention) and the saint miraculously alive, raising his hand. A corpse tumbles from its tomb, figures twist, fall, flee, as Renaissance harmony yields to exhilarating mannerist turmoil. Room IX
5. ‘Portrait of Antonio Navagero’ (1565) by Giovanni Battista Moroni
Moroni, famous for portraying seductive, glamorous youths, here depicts middle-aged Navagero, Bergamo’s mayor, as similarly flamboyant in soft lynx fur, peach-pink suit and outrageously exaggerated codpiece. It’s a power portrait yet informal — Navagero, with furrowed, melancholy features, is caught mid-gesture, turning to us confidentially with a warm, astute gaze. In remote Bergamo, Moroni evolved his own vital naturalism, painting directly from life. Room XIX
6. ‘Supper at Emmaus’ (1606) by Caravaggio
Comparing this work with the 1601 version in London’s National Gallery of the same scene is like watching night fall. Everything, even the disciples’ astonishment, is muted, the colours sombre, the still-life feast reduced. Rather than emerging triumphantly, as in the London picture, Christ seems about to vanish into the shadows, disappearing from human view and certainty. Caravaggio painted this while on the run for murder, when his work darkened and psychologically deepened. Room XXVIII (currently on loan at the “Caravaggio 2025” exhibition at Palazzo Barberini in Rome)
7. ‘The Madonna of Carmel’ (1745) by Giambattista Tiepolo
Tiepolo’s brilliance bursts out here like the light flooding this 6.5-metre rococo canvas: vibrant colours, dynamic overlapping figures, theatrical gestures, painterly sensuality. The work has a stormy history. Created for a Venetian Carmelite church, it was stolen, taken to France, cut in two and finally reassembled when a benefactor bought both parts for the Brera. It has undergone several restorations; these are carried out at the Brera in situ in the gallery, behind glass, so visitors can watch the progress. Room XXXIV
8. ‘Still Life with Pewter Plate, Shrimps and a Lemon’ (1750-60) by Giacomo Ceruti
Ceruti was nicknamed “Pitocchetto” (the little beggar) for his empathetic realistic portraits of peasants and the impoverished. As meticulously detailed are his still lifes, which are comparable with Chardin’s for their sensitive yet spare depictions, play of light and colour — here, translucent effects in the glass contrasted with fleshy red shellfish — and poetic rendering of the everyday. Room XXXVI
9. ‘San Moisè’ (1930) by Filippo de Pisis (Palazzo Citterio)
De Pisis loved Venice’s “consolation of stone . . . the heavy eyelashes of marble windows, the laughter of columns and alleys”. In agitated, broken brushstrokes and silvery tones, his Venetian façades such as San Moisè church teem and move, the stones as alive as the fleeting figures and pecking pigeons. Palazzo Citterio has more than a dozen airy, febrile de Pisis paintings: lively counterpoints to the Old Masters yet continuous with their spiritual sensibility. Palazzo Citterio, Room 41a
10. ‘Miracle (Gothic Cathedral)’ (1943) by Marino Marini (Palazzo Citterio)
Marini, a marvellous presence at the Brera from the moment his anti-heroic, toppling “Horse and Rider” greets you by the entrance in the loggia (it will be moved this year to the Palazzo Citterio), taught sculpture at the Accademia di Brera (housed in the museum) until a bomb destroyed his studio in 1942 and he fled to Switzerland. “Miracle (Gothic Cathedral)” is among the experimental polychrome plaster sculptures — surfaces scored, scratched, scarred — that he made there. Witnesses to wartime suffering, expressing fragility and disquiet yet also human dignity, they were influenced by the archaic grandeur of the Etruscans, classicism and cubism’s fragmented abstraction. This stoic figure shares the pathos and solemnity of the Titians, Tintorettos and Veroneses in the old part of the Brera. Marini wanted “a new renaissance of sculpture in Italy, the new humanist, the new reality”. Palazzo Citterio, Room 42
Have you been to the Pinacoteca di Brera or the Palazzo Citterio, and if so, what were your favourite artworks there? Tell us in the comments below. And follow FT Globetrotter on Instagram at @FTGlobetrotter
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