Milan's Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, 2011

Next we visited Milan's oldest museum, the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, noted for its Titians, Veronese, Carravaggio, for us especially its Breughels, the cartoon of Rafael's School of Athens, and, lastly, the largest collection of Leonardo's notebooks, the Codex Atlanticus.

First the silly bits: in this Adoration of the Magi, by Rene Sance,1527, note the 
ultra-realism, namely, the dog pissing on the post

All through European painting, the convention is always to represent John the 
Baptist, even as a new-born, in his skins; here he is as a toddler in skins

An Adoration with a band in the background; Rene Sance, 1527

Serious now: a Botticelli

Very serious: the cartoon of Rafael's School of Athens; the School of Athens is 
in the Rafael Rooms of the Vatican, which we saw in March and of which I took 
about 50 fotos; before doing a big fresco, the master would do a full-size charcoal

drawing of the piece, called a cartoon

Up closer

Cardinal Borromeo, the founder of the Pinacoteca, was an admirer of Breughel 
and acquired a number of the latter's works; here are a few...

Winter scene (probably with an Adoration or Ascension tucked in somewhere)

Lion's Den

One of B's allegorical works

Another of Caravaggio's Fruit

Much else in the museum, but these gold copies of Hadrian's 
Column and Anthony's (Marcus) Column impressed us

As is well known, Leonardo's Last Supper began deteriorating as the paint dried 
(L used an experimental technique, not real fresco) and two copies were made, 
by his assistants, within a few years of the original; this is one, snapped quickly 
while the guard was talking on the phone; why didn't we go see the real Last 
Supper? You ask; fact is, we didn't plan two months ahead to get reservations....

Finally, in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, among the thousands of incunibles and 
other stuff, an impressive exhibition from the Codex Atlanticus, the largest 
collection of Leonardo's notebooks; it's impossible not to be supremely impressed...