Pinacoteca di Brera

The Pinacoteca di Brera was officially established in 1809, although a first heterogeneous collection of works was already present from 1776 - and expanded in the following years - for educational purposes, alongside the Academy of Fine Arts wanted by Maria Teresa of Austria. The corpus was in fact to constitute a collection of exemplary works, intended for the training of students.
When Milan became the capital of the Italian Kingdom, the collection, at Napoleone's will, was transformed into a museum that intended to display the most significant paintings from all the territories conquered by the French armies. Brera therefore, unlike other great Italian museums, such as the Uffizi for example, was not born from the private collecting of princes and aristocracy but from political and state collecting.
In fact, from the early nineteenth century, even after the suppression of many religious orders, the paintings requisitioned from churches and convents in Lombardy were brought together, together with works of identical origin taken from the various departments of the Italian Kingdom. This birth explains the prevalence, in the collections, of sacred paintings, often of large format, and gives the museum a particular physiognomy, only partly mitigated by subsequent acquisitions.