Museo Poldi-Pezzoli ★

A small private museum stuffed with great paitings in Milan, Italy

The pleasant effect of seeing the Bellinis, Botticellis, and Tiepolos amid these salons is reminiscent of a visit to other private collections, such as the Frick Collection in New York City and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.

This stunning treasure trove leans a bit toward Venetian painters (such as Francesco Guardi's elegantly moody Grey Lagoon), but also ventures widely throughout Italian painting and into the northern and Flemish schools.

It was amassed by 19th-century collector Giacomo Poldi-Pezzoli, who donated his villa and its treasures to the city in 1881. Antonio Pollaiuolo's Portrait of a Young Woman is often likened to the Mona Lisa, in that it is a haunting image you will recognize immediately upon seeing it. The collections also include porcelain, watches, jewels, and many of the palazzo's original furnishings.

CD-ROM terminals let you explore bits of the collections not currently on display, especially arms and armor, the best of which is housed in an elaborate pietra-serena (the dark gray stone, typical to Tuscany) room designed by Pomodoro. For now they offer free audioguides (there may be a charge in the future).

The admission ticket is actually a cumulative one that includes admission to the Museo Teatrale della Scala (in effect, you get the Scala one free).

Top 10 exhibits in the Museo Poldi Pezzoli

1. S. Nicola da Tolentino by Piero della Francesca

This single panel was once part of an altarpiece (now broken up and dispersed throughout Europe and the USA) painted between 1454 and 1469 for the Augustian church in the artist's Tuscan hometown of Borgo San Sepolcro. San Nicola of Tolentino, dressed in Augustinian black robes and leather belt alongside the star that supposedly appeared at his birth, was a thirteenth century monk only elevated to sainthood eight years previously, though the face might actually be a portrait of the prioor who commissioned the altarpiece.

2. Pietà by Giovanni Bellini

The Venetian's 1460 take on a deathly pale Christ rising from his tomb illustrates that Jesus's sacrifice brought the possibility of redemption (everlasting life) back to man through the symbolism of dead trees topping the righthand mountain while live ones flourish on the left. Those towering cliffs, along with a meandering, receding pathway and strong horizontals to contrast with Christ's vertical line, help give the scant background great depth.

3. The Virgin and Child by Botticelli

By 1480, Botticelli had matured as an artist but not yet undergone the spiritual crisis that would inform his later, more static works (including the Mourning the Dead Christ nearby). Though a religious paintign, he sets it in an everyday scene, a mother leafing through the Book of Hours (a popular layman's prayer book) with her son in her lap, a sunset out the window, and domesticity around her. The fruit bowl is significant, though, in symbolic iconography: figs from Christ's Ressurrection, cerries for hsi blood, and plums for the tender mothely affection. However, the more obvious symbols--the crown of thorns on baby Jesus's arm and nails clutched in his fist--were added sometime later.

4. Madonna and Child by Mantegna

Bellini's Lombard brother-in-law took Florentine sculptor Donatello's techniques, iconography, naturalism, and compositions and translated them into painting for a profound influence on Northern Italy's early Renaissance. This is a mature Mantegna work, datable to the 1490s and sure in its handling of the pyramidal composition and natrualism of a mother and her baby, though the colors and nuance are muted by a thick layer of misguided 19th-century varnish. Compare it with his small, early (1450s) Portrait of a Man on the wdll, full of bold realism (a poor shaving job and age veins in the temples) and expressivenes both in the figure's face and the artist's brushwork.

5. Portrait of a Lady by Antonio or Piero del Pollaiolo

Which Pollaiolo brother painted this 1470 portait (based on the fashions and a former inscription, probably a wealthy Florentine banker's wife) is unclear, but its beauty is such that the museum uses it as their emblem. The Pollaiuolo married Flemish detailing with Italian technical tricks to create brilliant portraits. Light reflects off her pearls and eyes and turns her skin transparent and glowing while a thin black line seperates her from the background. To keep this strictly left-profile portrait (an ancient custom) from going two-dimensional, her chest is turned slightly towards us and just the perspective on her necklace's cut ruby pendant flanked by diamonds is enough to hint at depth.

6. Pomodoro Armory

The best pieces among the museum's vast arms and armor collection--Poldi's first love; he started this collection at age 24-- got a new home in 2000 when famed modern sculptor Arnoldo Pomodoro's dark, designer armory opened just off the entrance. The pieces--largely 16th century Italian, though they range from German to Oriental, ancient Etruscan and Greek to 19th century--seem to float on light in their suken display cases surrounded by somber grey pietra serena stone walls and steely sculpted shapes along the ceiling.

7. Sala del Settecento Veneto

The 18th Century Venetian Room stars vedutas. An Italian veduta is unlike most landscape painting in that is harmonizes nature with architecture, and Venice's Canaletto (famous for his venetian canal views) was the master. His rigor for realism and techological saavy led Canaletto to use a camera lucida to project an image of a live scene onto a wall, which he would then sketch or trace; the drawing for the Poldi's Meadow in the Valley of Padova (1741-46) is now at Windsor. Francesco Guardi took the veduta form one step closer to modernism in vedutas such as the moody 1765 Gondola's on the Lagoon on the nearby pedestal. You'll also see that neither painter's love of realistic landscapes stopped him from enjoying fantasy compositions of imaginary ancient ruins. There are also several of Tiepolo's preparatory paintings, including an Allegory of Strength and Wisdom that would become so popular he painted it over and over.

8. Sala Nera

The Black Room's ebony and ivory walls were destroyed by 1943 bombs, but the ornate doors and inlaid furnishings give an idea of the lost opulance, as do the 1510-20 Flemish altarpiece, paintings by Sassoferrato and Sustermans, and the 1810 pietra dura tabletop. The collector's mother, Rosa Poldi Pezzoli, commissioned the Faith in God statue from Lorenzo Bartolini in 1833 to help her accept and adapt to her recent widowhood. Bartolini also sculpted Rosina's portait bust in the adjacent Sala dei Vetri Antichi di Murano, full of Venetian glassware, ancient bronzes and vases, paintings by Il Sodoma and Hayez, and a Bertini portriait of the mustacioed Gian Giacomo Poldi Pezzoli himself.

9. Sala dell'Affresco

The vast Tapestry of the Hunt from Tabriz is signed and dated by Northwest Persian master Ghyas el Din Jami in 1542-43, and is one of the most imporant in Italy. Other carpets and fabrics are rotated onto display, though the Giulio Romano-designed 1540-45 one of putti is always here. The ceiling fresco, Carlo Carloni's Apothesis of Bartolomeo Colleoni (1745), was detached from a Bergamo villa; the artist's preparatory sketch for it sits on a corner easel.

10. Gabinetti degli Ori

The Treasure Chamber is packed largely with 15th- to 17th-century jewelry, Limoges enamels, and reliquaries. Among the colletion are a spectacular 19th-century gold necklace hung with a dozen cameos (no 795), a 16th-century ring set with four halfpearls that flips open to hold medicinal powders...or poisons (no 655), and a 16c English Medallion of the Invincible Armada (no 733). This mother-of-pearl oval etched with Noah's Ark and wrapped in gold and rubies, is inscribed in Latin "Calm amongst stormy waves" and was probably a gift from Elizabeth I to Drake or Hawkins after their famous 1588 defeat of Spain.

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