Museo Poldi Pezzoli

The Museo Poldi Pezzoli is a privately founded museum in the centre of Milan, at Via Manzoni 12, a short walk from La Scala opera house. It began as a family collection assembled by Gian Giacomo Poldi Pezzoli and his forebears, above all his mother, Rosa Trivulzio, whose literary family had close ties to leading figures of Milanese Neoclassicism. When Gian Giacomo inherited the palazzo and its holdings on reaching adulthood in 1846, he enlarged the collection and arranged it in rooms, each inspired by a different style from the trecento to the Baroque, an unusual approach for the period that served as a reference for other private museums, including those of Isabella Stewart Gardner in Boston and of Nelly Jacquemart and Edouard André in France. On his death in 1879 he bequeathed the house and its contents to the Brera Academy, and the museum officially opened in 1881 under the direction of Giuseppe Bertini. During the Second World War the paintings were moved to safety, but stained glass, stuccoes and carvings were lost; the museum reopened in 1951 after a restoration aimed at recovering its former splendour. Its painting collection includes works by Sandro Botticelli, such as Virgin of the Book and Pietà, as well as pieces by Fra Filippo Lippi, Piero della Francesca, Andrea Mantegna, Canaletto and Francesco Guardi, whose Gondolas on the Lagoon is among its highlights. The most represented painters include Ambrogio Bergognone, Cima da Conegliano and Francesco Hayez, while other notable paintings include The Black Knight by Giovanni Battista Moroni and Portrait of a Young Woman by Piero Pollaiuolo.