Milanese School 1470 – 1540

Milan’s art flourished in the Middle-Ages, and with the Visconti family being major patrons of the arts, the city became an important centre of Gothic art and architecture (Milan Cathedral being the city’s most formidable work of Gothic architecture). Leonardo worked in Milan from 1482 until 1499. He was commissioned to paint the Virgin of the Rocks for the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception and The Last Supper for the monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie.

Milanese School always put the utmost attention to aesthetic research, trying to find the highest degree of harmony and formal perfection in every artistic manifestation. The characteristics that distinguished their production from the earlier and contemporaneous civilizations of ancient times were: attention and adherence to realism, which in sculpture translated into a particular observation of human anatomy, and painting resolved both in Research of the perspective representation of space, both in the volume yield; In architecture the close correspondence between form and function, a direct consequence of a rational approach to understanding the world and knowledge. These formal achievements, which are at the origin of European classicism, have influenced the subsequent development of the Western world at a level far beyond the art history.

Aesthetics is, traditionally, a field of philosophy that deals with the knowledge of beautiful natural or artistic. Laying the foundations of modern aesthetics, further break the art and philosophical reflection by pronouncing the famous sentencing that art should soon be extinguished in its concept.

Milan is home to many cultural institutions, museums and art galleries. The Pinacoteca di Brera is one of Milan’s most important art galleries. It contains one of the foremost collections of Italian painting, including masterpieces such as the Brera Madonna by Piero della Francesca. The Castello Sforzesco hosts numerous art collections and exhibitions, especially statues, ancient arms and furnitures, as well as the Pinacoteca del Castello Sforzesco, with an art collection including Michelangelo’s last sculpture, the Rondanini Pietà, Andrea Mantegna’s Trivulzio Madonna and Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex Trivulzianus manuscript. The Castello complex also includes The Museum of Ancient Art, The Furniture Museum, The Museum of Musical Instruments and the Applied Arts Collection, The Egyptian and Prehistoric sections of the Archaeological Museum and the Achille Bertarelli Print Collection.