Gallerie dell’Ottocento, Gallerie d’Italia – Milano

In the centre of Milan, between Piazza della Scala, Via Manzoni and Via Morone, four highly prestigious historical buildings – Anguissola (1775-78), Antona Traversi (1829), Brentani (1829) and Beltrami (1906-11) – have been connected up and restructured to exhibit the 19^th– and 20^th-century painting collections of Intesa Sanpaolo and Fondazione Cariplo. In the buildings, which delineate a synthesis of the urban and architectural development of the city between the end of the 18^th century and the early decades of the last century, the layout is structured into exhibition sections that take up and update the relationship between the furnishings and the particular architectural container of the period in which each building was constructed.
Access is gained from Piazza della Scala, where the old premises of the Banca Commerciale Italiana have been adapted to house the 20^th-century collections. Following this, the Gallerie dell’Ottocento [19^th– Century Galleries] wind their way, organised by subject, along a first sequence of rooms inside Palazzo Anguissola Antona Traversi and, passing through the new glazed courtyard of the latter, continue into a second suite of ten environments inside Palazzo Brentani. The visitors’ itinerary ends with a cafeteria and a bookshop facing onto Via Manzoni.

Palazzo Anguissola and the exhibition trestles
In the 20^th century, Palazzo Anguissola del Soave became the residence of Raffaele Mattioli, founder of the Banca Commerciale Italiana, whose wife has lived there in recent times. Intesa Sanpaolo has transformed the ground floor into a historical archive, while the main floor has been turned into offices and reception rooms.
Today’s transformation has benefited from the restoration completed in the 1990s by architects Valle, Broggi and Burckardt, when all the electrical and air conditioning fittings were updated and the gold, stucco and plaster decorations were completely restored, transforming the archive and offices in a short time and with few interventions.
The decorative apparatus is so prominent that it renders the use of these environments very delicate.
The decorative structure has made it necessary to display pieces independent of the walls, and, in the vast majority of cases, this takes place using trestles. All the trestles are made of bronze and made-to-measure to bear the significant weight of Canova’s plasters and to also to accommodate the large paintings by Hayez and Migliara in a consistent manner. The trestles for the plasters are designed with a double-column structure and with crossed legs and are seemingly extremely thin and light, but in reality very solid and strong. Ultra- thick bronze plates are welded together with a central cavity that lightens their weight, also allowing the passage of the lighting cables. Construction in profiles has enabled a high degree of detail to be obtained in the tubular parts, with shaped surfaces and thin joints at the junction points. Although the works are of different dimensions, they are maintained at the same height to favour comparison and a more complete reading of the stories told in them, from the bas-reliefs with scenes from the Iliad in the Temple Room to those inspired by Plato’s Phaedo in the Monochrome Room, to those with domestic and religious scenes in the Cameo Room. Only in some rooms has it been possible to exhibit with wires, which are hooked up to a bar fixed without damaging the decorations: in some rooms the groups of smaller paintings are mounted on panels fixed directly onto the standard lamps.

Palazzo Anguissola Antona Traversi and the new glazed courtyard
In 1817 Count Anguissola sold his palazzo to a rich exponent of the Milanese middle class, the lawyer Giovanni Battista Traversi, who in 1829 commissioned Luigi Canonica to create its front volume facing onto Via Manzoni. Canonica designed the front elevation with Corinthian pilaster strips, the stairway of honour of Palazzo Anguissola and the square cloister with rounded corners with imposing Doric columns.
Today this cloister is the distribution hub of the Gallerie dell’Ottocento. Completely closed off by glass panels that highlight its form and that of the colonnade, the courtyard connects up the entrance on Via Manzoni at no. 10, the rooms of Palazzo Anguissola and the internal garden. The new natural bronze door and window frames establish the correct relationship with the columns, completing the voids proportionately. This glazed wall organises the space into two communicating environments that receive light from each other and, as two parallel exhibition cycles, they can host important sculptures such as Pomodoro’s Grand Disc, which has stood at the centre of the cloister for many years now.

The Gallerie Manzoni: domestic stage
From the cloister you access the Gallerie Manzoni, a suite of 10 rooms going through Palazzo Anguissola Antona Traversi and Palazzo Brentani. Here the 19^th-century paintings are displayed according to a subdivision by subject: the Lombard landscape, genre painting, the atmospheric experimentation with Verismo, the sublime, Symbolism, going on to introduce, with the paintings of Boccioni, the season of Futurism.
Completely different from that of Palazzo del Soave, the atmosphere is obtained by drastically separating the museum area from the traffic on Via Manzoni onto which it faces. From the street the succession of windows is obscured by soft curtains that take up the colours of the sections of the museum. The old offices of the bank have made way for nineteenth-century domestic environments that construct a theatre stage, placing the works at the centre for visitors to contemplate. The rooms mark the exhibition themes, also underlined by a change of colour on the walls, the theatrical tones of which showcase the precious gilded or silver frames, hand-crafted, recovered following meticulous restoration. Finally, the reconstructed floor, made of antique oak with narrow slats, which reproduces those used in 19^th-century buildings, is the connecting element in the itinerary.
The rooms have been fitted with air conditioning units for total control of temperature and relative humidity, with calibrated lighting units and burglar alarms integrated into the partition walls. Thanks to the system for hanging the paintings, all the systems integrated into the walls are concealed and arranged so as not to disturb the pleasure of the visit.
The basic display criterion has come about from analysis of the phenomenon of industrial furnishing that in the 19^th century began to enter middle-class residences as a product purchasable on the market, undermining the made-to-measure project integrated into the architectural composition.