The first room of the Pinacoteca di Brera with the 12 busts of Canova restored by Banca Ifis has been rearranged

As of May 16, 2025, the Pinacoteca di Brera, in Room 1, an introductory area to the narrative of the museum collections and "La grande Brera, has set up the exhibition La bellezza e l’ideale. The Canova Collection of Banca Ifis and the Traveling Picture Gallery, an exhibition entirely dedicated to the neoclassical sculptor Antonio Canova. The stars of the exhibition are twelve busts made by Canova, recovered and restored by Banca Ifis, which are being displayed for the first time in the Lombard capital in collaboration with the Pinacoteca di Brera.

This is the first rearrangement of this space since 2018, an intervention that aims to pay homage on the one hand to Canova’s contribution to the birth of the collection of plaster casts intended for the students of the Academy, and on the other hand to the fundamental role of the patrons who over time have made the Pinacoteca’s artistic heritage grow.

In addition to busts from the Banca Ifis collection, the exhibition is enriched by the return after more than a century of the Vestale, a marble bust sculpted by Canova between 1818 and 1819. Completing the itinerary is a selection of small enamel reproductions of paintings from the collection of Giovanni Battista Sommariva, a politician and art collector close to Napoleonic ideology, donated by Emilia Sommariva Seillière to the Pinacoteca in 1973.

The initiative, curated by Chiara Rostagno and Valentina Ferrari, represents a new chapter in the synergy between the Pinacoteca di Brera and Banca Ifis, which had already begun last December with the exhibition on Mario Ceroli that inaugurated the restored spaces of Palazzo Citterio.

The busts in the Banca Ifis collection, dated between 1807 and 1818 and between 50 and 60 centimeters tall, were found in the Villa Canal alla Gherla, in the province of Treviso, and underwent a thorough restoration commissioned by the bank. Two of the sculptures, Paris and Beatrice, retain what are known as rèpere: small studs used by the rough-hewn sculptors in Canova’s studio to faithfully transfer proportions from the plaster model to marble. The subjects depicted include some of Canova’s most emblematic works: Hebe, Tersicore, the Italic Venus, the Peace, and portraits of four women from the Bonaparte family-Paolina Borghese, Carolina Murat, Elisa Baciocchi Bonaparte, and Letizia Ramolino Bonaparte.

The exhibition itinerary ideally extends along the visual axis that connects the Napoleon as Peaceful Mars, a plaster cast of the bronze original kept in the first courtyard of the Brera Academy. This sculpture, recently restored, was relocated to the center of Room 15 of the Pinacoteca, on the occasion of the bicentennial celebration of its founding.

“The decision to open the Pinacoteca’s exhibition itinerary,” says Angelo Crespi, General Director Pinacoteca di Brera, Palazzo Citterio, Braidense National Library, “with an exhibition of Canova, magnificently resolves a place that has had numerous destinations over the years: from a gallery for temporary exhibitions, to an introduction to visiting, to a simple disengagement for ancillary functions to the museum. The rearrangement focused on the great sculptor, being able to count on the generous long-term loan from Banca Ifis, which made available to the Pinacoteca di Brera 12 plaster heads of the Venetian sculptor of exemplary significance.” “This theory of busts,” Crespi continues, “has also made it possible to display, in the center, the marble of Canova’s Vestal, giving way to the idea of the new Department of Sculpture and Decorative Arts to relocate in the museum itinerary also the sculptures of our collection, expunged for museological reasons since 1902 and deposited in other institutions. As a counterbalance to Canova, it was decided, and this is another return, to set up the so-called ”traveling picture gallery“ of Giovanni Battista Sommariva’s collection. The idea is to pay homage to Neoclassicism, the style under whose aegis Brera was founded, foreshadowed by the great Milanese Enlightenment artists celebrated in the pantheon of our loggia, and realized by that handful of extraordinary artists who nurtured its walls: Andrea Appiani, Giuseppe Bossi, Antonio Canova.”

“Beauty, in addition to aesthetics, encompasses an ethical dimension that affects souls and that, today more than ever, needs to be promoted to spread ideals of peace and solidarity. For this reason, as Banca Ifis, we are happy to put the works of our collection at the center of the project promoted by the Pinacoteca di Brera, which proposes the ideal of beauty as an essential element for human life,” said Ernesto Fürstenberg Fassio, President of Banca Ifis. “Banca Ifis’ support for the preservation and promotion of culture, alongside Italy’s leading museum institutions, reaches a new milestone with the exhibition La Bellezza e l’Ideale. Antonio Canova’s plaster casts from our collection now welcome visitors from all over the world at the entrance to the Pinacoteca di Brera exhibition route. With this initiative, we continue our support for the Pinacoteca that began with the signing of the ”Pact for Brera“ and then continued at Palazzo Citterio with the exhibition La forza di sognare ancora by artist Mario Ceroli.”

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog published by Contemplazioni.

Images: Beauty and the Ideal. Banca Ifis’s Canova collection and the traveling Pinacoteca | Milan, Pinacoteca di Brera @ Marco Erba / SGP

The first room of the Pinacoteca di Brera with the 12 busts of Canova restored by Banca Ifis has been rearranged

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