Museo d'Arte Antica del Castello Sforzesco

Around the Ducal Courtyard of Sforza Castle, the rooms that once housed Galeazzo Maria Sforza and Ludovico il Moro now hold some four hundred sculptures and monuments carrying Milan's story from the fifth to the sixteenth century. The castle also preserves Leonardo da Vinci's painted Sala delle Asse.

Why it matters

The Museum of Ancient Art is where Milan's medieval and Renaissance identity is physically assembled. Funerary monuments of the Visconti and Sforza dynasties, sculpture rescued from demolished monasteries and demolished city gates, and inscriptions from noble palaces stand in the very rooms built for the dukes who commissioned them. The collection of roughly four hundred works is counted among the major sculpture collections in Italy, and unlike a freestanding gallery it interprets its objects in their political home: the castle itself is the largest exhibit. For anyone arriving from the cathedral or Brera, this museum supplies the preceding chapters of the Milanese story that those buildings continue.

What to notice

The museum occupies elegant halls facing the Corte Ducale, formerly the residence of Galeazzo Maria Sforza and Ludovico il Moro; the ducal architecture frames the collection. Among the earliest inscriptions, look for the Lapide dei Consoli of 1178 and the sixteenth-century Lapide di Ausonio, documents carved in stone that anchor the city's civic chronology. Terracotta decoration is a Lombard speciality, exemplified by the busts of emperors from the Portale Mediceo, and nineteenth-century plaster casts are displayed explicitly as tools of nineteenth-century taste rather than passed off as originals. The route's two fixed points are Sala VII, the Sala delle Asse, where Leonardo da Vinci painted an illusionistic pergola of mulberry branches for the Sforza court, and Sala XIV, the Armeria, where edged weapons and firearms from the late fourteenth century onward fill the ducal armoury.

Context and history

The castle built by the Sforza dukes in the second half of the fifteenth century became a military stronghold and later, at the turn of the twentieth century, the city's principal historical museum complex, saved from demolition and restored as a civic institution. The sculpture and monument collections were assembled from monasteries suppressed in the Napoleonic era, from gates demolished when the Spanish walls came down, and from noble residences that had dispersed their decorations. Leonardo worked at the castle in the 1490s for Ludovico il Moro, and the Sala delle Asse ceiling, long subjected to restoration campaigns, remains the museum's most discussed room. The collection forms part of the castle's civic museums.