Milan: Brera Gallery

 

 

 

Edward Hutton believed that Milan produced no school of painting but that its art galleries, especially the Brera, contained many fine works from all over Italy. He provided brief listings of the holdings in the Brera's rooms. Below find some highlights from his account.

 

But happily for the traveller, the works of the North Italian schools by no means fill the Brera and the other public galleries of Milan. Many a masterpiece is to be found there of the true Italian schools, as well as a few pictures from the North, and to these we shall now turn our attention.

We pass at once to a painter, Borgognone (1450-1523), Foppa’s pupil a man excellent as an artist and full of subtle harmonies in his landscape, and yet not without a strength and almost country roughness found in his figures.

 

 

Borgognones work in Milan is extraordinarily plentiful…. Little by little, I think as we get to know him better, the study of his work becomes a study of backgrounds. These delicate and delightful little scenes he would paint perhaps from real life or from a wonderful memory of some glimpse he had had of a city street, or the reach of a canal, or a byway in the country, and his certainty of vision as of touch in these things is magical and beyond praise, something that Mr. Berenson compares with Whistler. 

 

But with Borgognone the school of Milan, if it can be said ever to have existed, comes suddenly to an end. Bramante appears, and after Bramante Leonardo. They were only not an utter disaster for Milan because there was really nothing to destroy. The native artistic genius that they might have killed had never existed, and their schools consist, as we might suppose, of copyists and prettifiers… (122)

 

A whole room is given over to the Late Bolognese masters, but these will not detain us, though our fathers would have spent much time there. We turn with a real eagerness that they would have failed to understand to the pictures of Gentile da Fabriano, Piero della Francesca, Luca Signorelli, Giovanni Santi, Benozzo Gozzoli and, once more at one with our ancestors, Raphael….

 

We come into the real Umbrian indeed with the work of Giovanni Santi, the father of Raphael, who has here a charming picture of the Annunciation; and to the most perfect expression of that school in the glorious picture by Raphael, one of his few really successful subject panels in the Sposalizio. It is a priceless treasure that cannot be matched, but it is so well known that to describe it would be absurd.

 

Two works, at any rate, by Northern masters, the great and beautiful Rembrandt, so rare a thing in Italy, a portrait of his sister, an early work, and the portrait of the Princess Amalie by Vandyck, should not be missed. While our eyes rest upon the Rembrandt all Milan seems to be nothing but make-believe, and all but three of the works here in the Brera, the merest pretence. The great Dutchman comes among these Italians even in Milan, like an emperor, and it is they who seem to be as strangers. [126-127]

 

 

 ###

Edward Hutton: The Cities of Lombardy, New York, 1912. Pp. 122-127.