Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Accademies & Collectors
When Pope Clement XIV (1769-74) suppressed the Jesuit order, their grand palace and
well-stocked library on Via Brera was appropriated by the ruling Austrian state. At the
time, Maria Theresa and her son Joseph II were engaged in a wide-ranging program of re-
forms in Milan, which extended to the city's educational establishments. Giuseppe Pi-
ermarini, who had designed La Scala, was chosen to adapt the palace for use as a new art
academy and in 1801 Giuseppe Bossi was appointed secretary. An ardent republican, artist,
connoisseur and friend of Canova and Angelica Kauffmann, Bossi assembled the nucleus
of Brera's art collection.
The pinacoteca (gallery) was to come later in 1809, under the direction of Viceroy
Eugène de Beaubarnais, in fulfillment of Napoleonic policy intent on creating cultural re-
positories for public edification much in the same vein as the Louvre. Prestigious works of
art, considered symbols of national identity, were confiscated from churches and monaster-
ies in the Veneto, Mantua, Ferrara, Bologna, Ravenna, Urbino and the Papal States and
brought to Brera. The focus, naturally, was on the Italians (Bellini, Bramante, Luini,
Mantegna, Raphael and Titian), reflecting the museum's social context and role as a great
workshop of art.
At the same time men like Count Giacomo Carrara (1714-96), descended from that long
line of wealthy Lombard art patrons, sought to establish a similar institution in Bergamo.
Well educated and well travelled, Carrara was an art connoisseur who believed passionately
in the values of the Renaissance in northern Italy. By his death he had amassed 1300 works
of art, all of which he bequeathed to his new Accademia Carrara in the hope of reviving the
local Bergamo school, which boasted great talents such as portraitist Giovanni Moroni and
Lorenzo Lotto. Although Venetian by birth, Lotto spent his most productive years in Ber-
gamo and Brescia leaving the glorious Pala Martinengo in the church of San Stefano, fres-
coes in the Suardi chapel in Trescore and some 20 canvases commissioned by wealthy mer-
chants and aristocrats, many of which now live in the Carrara collection.
Although the Carrara is the grandest expression of civic-minded private patronage in
Lombardy, many other enlightened individuals formed smaller but equally impressive col-
lections. Count Guglielmo Lochis (1789-1859), the pro-Austrian podestĂ  (mayor) of Ber-
gamo, donated many works from his collection to Carrara, as did art critic Giovanni
Morelli (1816-91). In Milan, Gian Giacomo Poldi Pezzoli (1822-79) amassed one of the
finest private collections in Europe and modelled his apartments on the house-museum that
he had seen in London (which was later to become the Victoria & Albert Museum). His
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