Milan House Museum basks visitors

When the Hapsburg viceroy Maximilian was forced to abandon rule over Lombardy and Veneto in 1859, and retreated from Milan to his castle in Trieste, the Milanese barons Fausto and Giuseppe Bagatti Valsecchi were teenagers. As the highborn brothers matured, they bore witness to the consolidation of the Kingdom of Italy under Savoy rule, and by the time they neared middle age, one of the great cultural challenges of the time was to forge an Italian identity. The freshly minted nation did not speak a common language: what is now considered Italian was Florentine dialect. The kingdom's first king, Victor Emanuel II, spoke almost entirely Piedmontese and French. In keeping with the spirit of new patriotism, the Bagatti Valsecchi brothers turned to Lombard roots in the High Renaissance when they renovated their family palazzo in heart of Milan. Assiduous collectors of Renaissance objects, decor and art, they sought to create a seamless environment that harkened back to Lombardy's artistic golden age of the 15th and 16th centuries - the era of Ludovico il Moro, Leonardo da Vinci and Ambrogio Bevilacqua. "Compared to the wide-ranging eclecticism that had been in vogue just a few decades earlier...this exclusive predilection was part of the broader context of post-unification Italy, which relied on the evocation of that glorious period for the construction of a new national identity," wrote Lucia Pini, director of the Bagatti Valsecchi Museum in the catalogue for the 2010 exhibit "Unexpected Guests". "The close link between container and content - that is, between the house and objects - was a defining feature of the brothers' operation from the start," she continued. "The house was...meant to provide them with a convincing and flawless setting. "We did not want to make a museum or a collection, but rather the reconstruction of a refined home of the mid-1500's, where one could find objects from the 15th and 16th century of genres of all types: pictures, tapestries, carpets, furniture, weapons, pottery, bronzes, glass, jewelry, shoes, household utensils of every kind collected by careful study and returned to their original use," Giuseppe Bagatti Valsecchi once explained. Renaissance paintings like Christ the Redeemer by Giampetrino and Madonna with Child by Ambrogio Bevilacqua flank 15th-century chests and engraved leather trunks. Flemish tapestries, cabinets of various shapes, tables and chairs with inlaid wood-carving, golden pill boxes, 15th and 16th century Venetian glass, ivory sundials and ancient musical instruments are spread throughout the lavishly decorated rooms. Cutting-edge conveniences of the late 19th century, like water taps, showers and electrical lamps are camouflaged in neo-Renaissance form. The entire collection and its tailored setting remained private, part of the home of the brothers' heirs until 1975. At that time, Pasino - one of Giuseppe's sons - donated the entire collection to the Bagatti Valsecchi Foundation. It is now hosted in perpetuity in the Bagatti Valsecchi Museum on the main floor of the original palazzo in Milan's Via Santa Spirito. From: ANSA