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The exhibition, set up in the rooms of the ancient Spanish Hospital, will be open to the public from 15 September to 19 December with free admission - Image gallery

Milan, 14 September 2021 – The Castello Sforzesco in Milan inaugurates, in the rooms of the ancient Spanish Hospital, a cycle of exhibitions dedicated to the graphic collections of the Cabinet of Drawings and the civic "Achille Bertarelli" Print Collection. The first dossier exhibition, which opens to the public on Wednesday 15 September, presents five great Venetian masters of the XNUMXth century: Giovanni Battista and Giandomenico Tiepolo, Giovanni Battista Piazzetta, Antonio Canal known as Canaletto and Bernardo Bellotto.

The exhibition, curated by Francesca Mariano and Eleonora Scianna, presents a rare opportunity for the public to admire works on paper which, by their very nature, must be preserved in dedicated rooms and in particular conditions and for this reason are excluded from the permanent museum itinerary of the Sforzesco Castle.

The drawings and prints on display, for a total of 48 works, come from some famous private Milanese collections such as those of two great art historians, Senator Giovanni Morelli and his student Gustavo Frizzoni, but also from the collections of the Milanese aristocracy like the Trivulzio collection and that of Antonio Guasconi. Donated to the city starting from the nineteenth century, these today constitute an important graphic heritage which documents, among other things, the different aspects of eighteenth-century artistic expression in Venice.

The first room is entirely dedicated to Giambattista Tiepolo (1696-1770) and his son Giandomenico (1727-1804): caricature drawings, animals and mythological scenes but also the splendid etched series of the "Capricci" of Giovanni Battista and the “Picturesque Ideas” by Giandomenico. A repertoire of the highest level which includes some of the best graphic works of the two masters.

The exhibition itinerary continues in the second room with one of the masterpieces of Giovanni Battista Piazzetta (1683-1754): the "Portrait of Field Marshal Mathias von der Schulenburg", coming from the Trivulzio collection and arriving at the Sforzesco Castle in 1935, and some "character heads " by the same author, extremely representative of a typically eighteenth-century genre and much loved by the artist. Following are some real and imaginary views of Padua and Venice engraved by Antonio Canal known as Canaletto (1697-1768). Among the typically Venetian genres, landscape painting had great success and diffusion since the eighteenth century and led the two famous painters to work for the greatest courts in Europe: exhibited here are two extraordinary prints created in Dresden for the great elector of Saxony, Augustus III , by Bernardo Bellotto (1722-1780), nephew and pupil of Canaletto.

The two exhibition rooms have been set up permanently with the intention of making the graphic heritage of the Sforzesco Castle accessible, on a rotating basis, a precious archive of prints and drawings, which for conservation reasons is normally kept in suitable rooms under conditions of controlled temperature and humidity and is not included in the Castle's museum itinerary.

The civic Cabinet of drawings was founded in the 35.000s to offer an adequate placement for works of art on paper, which had begun to flow into the city's collections starting from the mid-XNUMXth century on the initiative of artists and exponents of the Milanese aristocracy. Over time the heritage has been enriched and today includes around XNUMX drawings by Italian and foreign masters from the fifteenth century to the present day, with a particular wealth of Lombard examples. 

The “Achille Bertarelli” civic print collection is one of the largest image archives in the world, with a wealth of prints, posters, postcards and illustrations, estimated at around one million works. It was born in 1927 from an important nucleus donated by Achille Bertarelli and rigorously organized by him according to iconographic criteria in sections such as "Plans and Views", "Portraits", "Historical Events", "Popular Prints" which are the subject of continuous implementation. It preserves masterpieces of the art of printing from its origins in the fifteenth century and still represents a point of reference for contemporary graphics in Italy today.

The initiative is being carried out fifty-two years after the important exhibition "Eighteenth-century drawings in the collections of the Museum of Ancient Art of Milan" and fifty after the one dedicated to the drawings of "Giovanni Battista Piazzetta and the Academy" curated by the then director of the Mercedes Precerutti-Gaberi art collections.