The Civic Museums of the Visconti Castle in Pavia will host the major exhibition Pavia 1525: Arts in the Renaissance and the Tapestries of Battle from Sept. 19, 2025 to Jan. 11, 2026 to offer the public a broad look at the rich artistic and cultural landscape that characterized Pavia in the Renaissance, through masterpieces by such masters as Leonardo da Vinci, Ambrogio Bergognone, Bernardino Zenale and Pietro Perugino. During that period, the city experienced a phase of extraordinary cultural vivacity, becoming a crucial meeting point between Northern Europe and Italy, both politically and artistically.
The initiative is part of the celebrations for the 500th anniversary of the Battle of Pavia (Feb. 24, 1525), an event that marked European history, remembered as the first major conflict in which firearms determined the final outcome of the clash. The centerpiece of the exhibition will be the seven monumental tapestries from the Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte in Naples, exceptionally loaned for the occasion. Made between 1528 and 1531 in Flanders by the Flemish manufactory of Jan and Willem De Moyen from designs by Bernard van Orley, the tapestries are visual representations of the famous battle and celebrate the victory of Charles V’s imperial army against French troops led by King Francis I. After a major restoration and three major exhibitions in the United States, the precious tapestries come to Pavia to visually narrate the battle with a symbolic and pictorial refinement that still surprises with its modernity.
A distinctive feature of the exhibition will be the intense dialogue between paintings, drawings, sculptures, illuminated manuscripts and objects of’decorative art from important museums and collections, including the Pinacoteca di Brera, the Castello Sforzesco, the Veneranda Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, the Certosa di Pavia, the Musée d’art et d’histoire in Geneva, the Royal Collection in Windsor and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.
For the occasion, a majestic polyptych by Ambrogio Bergognone, originally intended for the Certosa di Pavia, whose panels are now scattered in different places and properties, will also be reassembled along the exhibition route. Thanks to the support of the Bracco Foundation, the public will be able to discover the results of non-invasive diagnostic analyses conducted on some of the panels of the polyptych by a team of scholars from the University of Milan, the IUSS-Pavia DeepTrace Technologies spin-off and the La Venaria Reale Conservation and Restoration Center.
The finely inlaid and painted 16th-century wooden choir from the Pavia church of San Marino, restored for the exhibition and displayed in the Civic Museums, will also be presented.
The exhibition is divided into two main sections. The first aims to analyze the lively historical-artistic context that characterized Pavia between the end of the 15th century and 1525. The second, deliberately separated to emphasize the caesura due to the conflict, is devoted entirely to the seven monumental tapestries.
The exhibition is curated by Francesco Frangi, Pietro Cesare Marani, Mauro Natale, Laura Aldovini and, for the tapestries section, Carmine Romano and Mario Epifani for the Capodimonte Museum. The scientific committee is chaired by Annalisa Zanni, former director of the Poldi Pezzoli Museum in Milan, and includes some of the leading experts on the Renaissance period and in particular, in addition to the curators, Marco Albertario, Rosario Maria Anzalone, Stefania Buganza, Pier Luigi Mulas, and Edoardo Rossetti. They are joined by other experts who contributed to the catalog, including Sylvain Bellenger, Thomas P. Campbell, Andrea Di Lorenzo, Luisa Giordano, and Cecilia Paredes.
The initiative is organized by the Civic Museums of Pavia and the Promoting and High Coordination Committee for the Five Hundredth Anniversary of the Battle of Pavia composed of the Municipality of Pavia, Fondazione Monte di Lombardia, Chamber of Commerce Cremona-Mantova-Pavia, University of Pavia, with the valuable support of Intesa Sanpaolo, Fondazione Cariplo and Fondazione Bracco.
The exhibition opens with the figure of Donato de’ Bardi, a painter active mainly in Liguria but who proudly signed himself “Papiensis,” considered one of the precursors of Renaissance painting in Pavia. The narrative unfolds through three thematic fulcrums: the Charterhouse, the Cathedral and the city.
One section is devoted to the Carthusian Monastery of Pavia, one of the most emblematic sites among the ambitious projects of the dukes in their second capital, rich in marble and altarpieces, which saw artists such as Bergognone and Perugino as protagonists.
Another thematic core concerns the reconstruction of Pavia’s Cathedral, an ambitious undertaking born of strong civic pride, which brought to Pavia famous architects and artists of the caliber of Bramante, Leonardo da Vinci and Francesco di Giorgio Martini. The exhibition will also feature the wooden model of the Cathedral preserved at the Castello Visconteo, along with the extremely rare Prevedari Engraving executed to a design by Bramante and a number of Leonardo’s drawings that evoke the master’s sojourns in Pavia, with studies on centrally planned churches, on the horses of Galeazzo da Sanseverino and on the theme of the ancient equestrian statue of Regisole, with sheets exceptionally loaned from the Royal Collections in Windsor.
Additional sections will be devoted to Pavia artists active in painting, wood sculpture and miniature, highlighting figures such as Bernardino Lanzani, Bartolomeo Bonone, the Master of the Deposition of Pavia, the Master of the Stories of St. Agnes, and master carvers such as the De Donati brothers and Giovanni Angelo Del Maino, an artist who was a great interpreter of wood sculpture in the early 16th century.
The exhibition culminates in the last large room where the public will be able to admire the seven Capodimonte tapestries, accompanied by an educational apparatus that will guide visitors through the highlights of the battle and its protagonists.
In the Castello Visconteo, visitors will also be able to explore the theme further with the multimedia exhibition dedicated to the Battle of Pavia, running until Dec. 29, 2025, for which an integrated ticket will be available at a discounted rate.
The exhibition catalog is published by Dario Cimorelli Editore.
|
|
| A major exhibition in Pavia on the famous battle of 1525. From Capodimonte on loan the tapestries depicting it |
Warning: the translation into English of the original Italian article was created using automatic tools. We undertake to review all articles, but we do not guarantee the total absence of inaccuracies in the translation due to the program. You can find the original by clicking on the ITA button. If you find any mistake,please contact us.
