The Carlo Maria Martini Diocesan Museum in Milan closes 2025 with a positive balance and presents the exhibition program that will accompany the public until the summer of 2026. The year just ended recorded more than 91,000 visitors, an increase compared to 2024, a result attributed to the quality and variety of the exhibitions on offer and to an articulated calendar of collateral events, including meetings, conferences, guided tours and in-depth appointments that flanked the exhibition activities. During 2025 the Museum consolidated its cultural project, strengthening its relationship with the public through programming that alternated between ancient art, photography and research projects. Two of the exhibitions inaugurated in the year just ended remain open to visitors in the early months of 2026: Lorenzo Lotto. The Nativity is open until February 1, while Elio Ciol. Glances and Silences continues until Feb. 15, 2026.
Officially opening the new program will be, from Feb. 19 to May 17, 2026, the exhibition Hans Memling. The Crucifixion. Four contemporary artists around a masterpiece, curated by Valeria Cafà, Giuseppe Frangi and Nadia Righi. The project was created in collaboration with Casa Testori and puts a central work of fifteenth-century Flemish painting in dialogue with the work of four contemporary artists Stefano Arienti, Matteo Fato, Julia Krahn and Danilo Sciorilli. The centerpiece of the exhibition is Hans Memling’s Crucifixion, on loan from the Civic Museums of Vicenza and placed at the center of the display as a visual and conceptual landmark. Around Memling’s panel develops the confrontation with the works of the four invited artists, who are called to observe and interpret the masterpiece with a slow and measured gaze, letting themselves be guided by the visual and spiritual force of the work. The dialogue between different languages does not intend to propose an illustrative rereading, but to build a reflection on the deep meaning of the image and its ability to generate new resonances in the present, according to the sensitivities and modes of expression of each author involved.
“2025 has confirmed the value of our cultural proposal, based on quality exhibition projects that have led to an increasingly direct and participatory dialogue with the public,” says Nadia Righi, director of the Museo Diocesano Carlo Maria Martini. “We are particularly pleased to have recorded more than 91,000 visitors, a result that testifies to the interest and appreciation for our exhibitions and collateral initiatives by an increasingly broad and differentiated public. The year 2026 opens with multiple proposals, ranging from the great masters of the past, such as Hans Memling compared with the works of contemporary artists, to projects that address sensitive and sensitive social issues such as Alzheimer’s. The Diocesan Museum wants to continue to be for Milan and the Diocese a space for meeting and reflection, where art, memory and community intertwine, offering meaningful cultural experiences that are accessible to all.”
From March 3 to May 3, 2026, the Diocesan Museum presents Don’t Forget. Alzheimer’s care and the experience of Sacra Famiglia, an exhibition realized in collaboration with Fondazione Sacra Famiglia of Cesano Boscone, a social-sanitary reality active for 130 years and among the most relevant in Italy in the disability sector. The project, curated by Giovanna Calvenzi, addresses the theme of Alzheimer’s through photography, focusing on the daily experience of people with the disease and their caregivers. The main core of the exhibition is made up of images by Marianna Sambiase, an educator at the Alzheimer’s Unit of the RSA San Pietro di Sacra Famiglia, which document with attention and participation the life inside the facility. Alongside these photographs are the shots taken by Enrico Zuppi in 1946, which restore a historical memory of the institution, and the images of Gianni Berengo Gardin, who died in 2025, who visited Sacra Famiglia in 2011 and photographed the daily life of the facility, made up of relationships, gestures of solidarity, glances and moments of sharing.
From late spring, the exhibition program continues with an extensive project dedicated to art photography. From May 19 to October 18, 2026, the Museum will host Werner Bischof. Point of view, an exhibition produced in collaboration with Magnum Photos and curated by Andrea Holzherr and Marco Bischof. Marking 110 years since the Swiss photographer’s birth, the exhibition offers an itinerary consisting of about a hundred vintage photographs, flanked by specimens and publications that delve into the author’s life and work. The exhibition project is divided into four sections, each dedicated to a key phase of Bischof’s activity. From the first images made in Switzerland, we move on to shots produced during and immediately after World War II, and then continue with reportages made in India, Japan, Korea, Hong Kong and Indochina. The last section is devoted to travels to North and South America in the 1950s, a period that ends with the photographer’s untimely death in a car accident.
To accompany the exhibitions, the Diocesan Museum is planning a calendar of collateral initiatives that includes in-depth meetings on the themes of the exhibitions, appointments dedicated to the history of art and photography, as well as guided tours curated by the Museum’s Educational Services. A program designed to broaden the context of reading the exhibitions and offer tools of interpretation to different audiences, in continuity with the work done in recent years.
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| Milan Diocesan Museum presents exhibition program through summer 2026: from Hans Memling to Werner Bischof |
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