Art collections of Fondazione Cariplo

The Fondazione Cariplo, based in Milan, holds an art collection that began in 1923, when the Cariplo savings bank, the Savings Bank of the Lombardy Provinces, started acquiring paintings and sculptures by contemporary artists shown in the city, with the aim of encouraging the arts in Lombardy. Buying continued after the Second World War, with annual purchases from the Permanente company and exhibitions of religious art at the Angelicum, and from the late 1960s the collection also grew through auction sales. Works from the Istituto Bancario Italiano were later added, and after the Amato Law numerous donations arrived, among them the Manara, Grolla and Marcenaro legacies. The holdings comprise around 767 paintings, 116 sculptures and 51 objects, dating from the first century AD to the second half of the twentieth. Their particular strength lies in nineteenth-century Italian painting, especially from Lombardy, although the collection also includes Late Antique stone sculpture, medieval wooden sculpture and Italian Renaissance and Baroque painting. Among the artists most represented online are Michele Cascella, with five works, and Achille Funi, with four, followed by Beppe Ciardi, Remo Brindisi and Anselmo Bucci. Notable paintings include Portrait of a Woman with Mask by Rosalba Carriera and The Dance of the Hours by Gaetano Previati. The collection also contains a portrait gallery of former Cariplo presidents. In 2011 the foundation released low-resolution images of works from its collections under a CC BY-SA licence. That same year the Gallerie di Piazza Scala opened in Milan, displaying almost two hundred nineteenth-century artworks from the Cariplo and Intesa San Paolo collections.