Museo Poldi Pezzoli

On Via Manzoni, the Poldi Pezzoli preserves the house of a collector who wanted to live inside art history. Botticelli and Piero della Francesca hang over inlaid floors, armour shares rooms with clocks and Murano glass. The Golden Room forms part of the house's historic interiors.

Why it matters

The Poldi Pezzoli is the founding model of the Milanese house museum. Gian Giacomo Poldi Pezzoli, a nobleman born in 1822, reshaped his family's palace room by room into an evocation of earlier ages and filled it with paintings, arms and armour, carpets, laces, jewellery, clocks, porcelain and glass. When he died in 1879 he left the house and its contents to the city, and the museum opened in 1881, setting the pattern that other Milan collectors later followed. Unlike a picture gallery, it lets you read taste itself: how a nineteenth-century Milanese aristocrat wanted the Quattrocento, the Islamic world and his own craft traditions to surround him. The paintings are a central part of the collection.

What to notice

The painting that anchors the collection is Piero del Pollaiolo's Portrait of a Young Woman, painted around 1470, whose profile has become an unofficial emblem of the museum; it appears on the museum's own visit page as the reference image of the collection. Around it hang works by Botticelli, Giovanni Bellini, Andrea Mantegna, Raphael, Piero della Francesca, Tiepolo, Canaletto and Francesco Hayez, a span that moves from early Renaissance Florence to nineteenth-century Milanese history painting. The applied-arts rooms include sundials and clocks, Meissen porcelain and Murano glass. At the back, the windows give onto a small garden and orangery, a rare breath of green at this address. A restoration project has brought the Golden Room's masterpieces together in the Collector's Room.

Context and history

Poldi Pezzoli built his collection with the advice of Giuseppe Bertini, a painter and decorator who coordinated the room schemes that still define the visit. The house suffered badly in 1943, when wartime bombing destroyed parts of the building; the museum reopened after the war with the surviving collections and restored decorations, which is why some rooms are reconstructions rather than survivals. In the twentieth century the Poldi Pezzoli Art Foundation was created to manage the bequest, and the museum became the reference point for the network of Milanese house museums that includes the Bagatti Valsecchi and Boschi Di Stefano houses. The Golden Room restoration has involved the World Monuments Fund.