The Beauty of Brera

The Beauty of Brera: a moment of conversation with art and life

March 9, 2025, Pasticceria San Carlo Brera

            Perhaps part of art’s essential beauty, as Hisham Mater noted, is that it speaks to us about ourselves: it invites us to, or rather demands from us a conversation. Einstein suggested to Tagore that the Apollo Belvedere would still be beautiful, even without our observation. That may well be true, but without our observation, we would not know its beauty, we would not experience its beauty, and feel our world changed by its presence.

            The Pinocoteca di Brera in Milan is a site where it is still possible to experience the beauty of art in its sense. Its collection is relatively small, yet also very grand. I can place only the Bargello in Florence, the Frick in New York, or the Accademia in Venice in this range. And to be there in March, one has for company only other solitary visitors or groups of school children. You therefore feel invited to dwell in close silence with the art, and discover what it might ask you.

            First of all, you discover that what it asks you is never singular or one-dimensional. The museum creates spaces for the artworks to be in ensemble, so that the conversation can build over time, in successive encounters with the paintings. Let me begin with Piero della Francesca’s Madonna, or San Bernardino altarpiece:

Piero della Francesco, San Bernardino Altarpiece

Piero’s Madonna performs an act of levitation not only of the Christ-child, but also of the saints surrounding her, and we are drawn in, floating as well, or suspended like the egg above her head. Only the heavy-metal Duke Federico seems grounded in his gleaming armor at her feet. We dwell here, as in a communal meditation. Moving closer, I read the comment by Ogawa Yoko printed on a label below:

This is a picture of Silence…. Silence fills the space…. But silent does not mean isolated. Each is telling his or her own story, in a world of meaning where words do not suffice.

The curators place words next to the painting not to inform us, but to lead us to look more closely and think more deeply. And in quiet conversation with this panel they have placed on the wall to the right Raphael’s Marriage of the Virgin.

More directly than Piero, Raphael brings us in, first with his perspectival lines ascending and receding to the small, bright, rectangular doorway. We are centered, in the foreground, on the hands of Joseph and Mary. The other figures and elements join in the dance: the suitor breaking his staff, the position of the feet, exchange of glances on either side (women behind Mary, men behind Joseph). And here again, the curatorial words:

Imagine you are inside this painting. Without creating a disturbance, pass by the couple being married in the foreground. Walk. As you cross the piazza, can you hear the sound of your feet on the pavement? … The door is open. Go inside and look around: are you surrounded by walls that go ’round and ’round… or are you the one that is turning?

            We are now part of a triangular conversation: between Piero and Raphael, and ourselves with both of them. Raphael, born among the mathematicians of Urbino, plays with the grid he has designed for us. Piero, active at the ducal court, settles on centered silence: the scene is composed both with geometric precision and meditative measure, with the silence that you sense after liturgical chant releases its resonance.

            Moving into an adjacent room, we enter into Veronese’s world. Nearly a century has passed, and the painter offers you two feasts. On one wall we step before a most unusual Last Supper. We have been conditioned to view the scene with Christ at the center surrounded by his disciples, as Castagno or Ghirlandaio portrayed it in Florence, or da Vinci more famously created it across town at the Convent of Santa Marie delle Grazie. Our gaze in these images flows to and from the central axis, as it does in the room we just left:

            But Veronese will not meet these expectations:

He places Jesus at the far left, drawing us toward him with a cascade of light. We are off-balance, seeing first of all a column in the central position, which almost divides the scene into two separate halves. The far right frames a man and woman, perhaps preparing food for the guests; then a begger receiving sustenance from a young woman; then a dog looking expetantly for a hand-out. Everything feels out of place: the setting of the Last Supper, the apparently superfluous figures, the eccentric composition, and not least we ourselves, having been jolted by Veronese’s vision.

            But if we watch, and wait, the painting gives voice to a greater meaning. Veronese’s image contains unexpected guests, including ourselves. We sweep in with our eyes from the right, and pass behind the column to the crowded, animated conversations surrounding Christ. Chromatically we are moved that way, by the waves of drapery enveloping the apostles.

            Turning round in the room, past the equally asymmetrical Agony in the Garden, we see his Dinner in the House of Simon:

Painted before the Last Supper, it leads us to weigh the values of symmetry, for here the panel appears, at first sight, evenly divided, and, as in the Marriage of the Virgin, the floor tiles guide us to the illuminated portal at the center. Yet what a difference from the earlier work of Raphael and Piero! For at the center we find two dogs and a cat tangling with each other, perhaps over a scrap left by a servant.

And the other human figures, too, are small. The main business, or busyness, of the painting is in the wings, with Jesus seated at the outermost left position, having his feet washed by a woman (Luke 7:38), while those around him look on or engage in conversation. In counterpoise sit the other guests, some of them gazing toward Jesus, others holding forth on their own matters. There is an atmosphere of distraction in the Pharisee’s house: a young servant appears to nip a sip of wine, another an entire flask, and in the far right two women surround a seated man, who perhaps has passed out from too much drink.

            Veronese paints us into an confusion. From our more placid, centered meditation with Piero or our ascending gaze with Raphael we are now jostled by his sights and sounds — we can hear the mixture of voices and the hisses and snarls of animals. His paintings speak to us, and we to them, in a different way, more earth-bound, perhaps. Yet we do not forget our first encounter; in fact the beauty of Brera allows us to collect and assimilate that initial frame of mind here, and so enhance our surprise and wonder over what Veronese offers us.

            For us now, a third room in the Brera offers a final conversation. We face Bellini’s Pietà:

We come from birth to death, from Piero’s Christ-child through Jesus speaking to his followers to his mortal form after the Crucifixion. We are brought back to a moment of meditation as Mary and John present his body to us as spiritual food for thought. Mary continues to embrace her son, while John turns away in despair. Bellini still retains a feeling for decorum and elegance; we see it in the satin trim of Mary’s gown or in the curls of John’s hair. Christ’s body is luminous, and his left hand falls outside the frame, resting above a quote derived from the pagan poet Propertius, a favorite of Renaissance humanists:

Haec fere quum gemitus turgentai luminina promant

[This work of Giovanni Bellini could weep]

Bellini’s figures confront us upright, a worthy of contemplative mourning. As we now turn to our left in the room, we see the painting that Bellini’s brother-in-law, Andrea Mantegna, designed in counterpoise to the Pietà:

            Mantegna’s Dead Christ startles us into mortality. Like Holbein’s painting of this theme, now in Basel, that shocked Dostoevsky into a seizure, Mantegna’s image displays Christ on a slab, his body a corpse, over which Mary and her companions can only weep at the margin, their faces distorted in grief. If Bellini presented the crucified Jesus as an object of veneration, Mantegna’s composition dwells on his corporality. The palette is that of muted earth. Where Bellini’s Christ extends his hand below the frame, moving our gaze to the elegant lines of Propertius, Mantegna’s figure offers no such solace. We see the soles of his feet off the edge of the slab, and we move upward from their piercing, following the foreshortening to his pallid face. In this work of art, the mathematics of linear perspective, so carefully codified by Piero, become an instrument through which we enter into and participate with the funereal absence of spirit.

            Once again, the Brera curators help us to deepen our conversation with the apposite questions, these from Sarah Dunant:

Have you ever seen Christ like this? The extreme foreshortening of his body is striking, even irreverent. No hope of resurretion here on this cold mortuary slab…. Is it any surprise this painting never left Mantegna’s studio? Who would take it? How could he let it go?

Yet the more matter-of-fact label next to these words tells us that Mantegna’s dramatic design “instantly established his painting as a reference point as significant as Michelangelo’s Pietà in St. Peter’s.”

            The labels speak to one another, as do the paintings throughout the Brera. The conversation has hidden depths and invites us to enter into their embracing rapport. This conversation as much, or more, than any other remains unfinished; and the curators reveal, behind a glass panel, a glimpse into their stores, holding other images that lie patiently in wait, like a collection of unconcious archetypes.

            And Mantegna’s human, all-too-human Christ spoke to later engravers and artists. The Brera library has among its collection the 1543 edition of Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica libri septem, his influential text on anatomy. Its frontispiece is an image of a public dissection, in which the corpse presents itself to the viewer with the same foreshortening:

            One hundred years later, Rembrandt adapted Mantegna’s perspective in The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Deijman:

            So the conversation continues, within and beyond the Brera. As others have done, we take these exchanges with us as we track our own history. We might hear these later images whisper to us a colder, more detached, more modern view of things, more medical and clinical. Absent is the mourning, a sacred sense of loss, that upheld our meditation. Though absent, these qualities remain in remembrance, on account of our experience with Brera’s beauty.

This piece has also been published on Medium.