Ca ‘Granda, University of Milan, Italy

The Ca ‘Granda, formerly the headquarters of the Ospedale Maggiore in Milan, is a building located between via Francesco Sforza, via Laghetto and via Festa del Perdono, close to the basilica of San Nazaro in Brolo. Work of the Florentine architect Filarete, it was one of the first Renaissance buildings in Milan and had a large following throughout northern Italy.

Ca ‘Granda is a great avant-gardist hospital in biomedical cure and research, with a millennial history, strictly tied to the milanese’s culture and society.

Ca ‘Granda is an extraordinary variety and richness of cultural heritage: the historical archive, the art collections, the bibliographical collections, and the medical instruments that open the perspective on Milan’s and Lombary’s inhabitants through the centuries.

History
The Filaret fifteenth project
The construction of the building began in the second half of the fifteenth century, on the impulse of the Duke of Milan Francesco Sforza, in order to provide the city with a single large hospital for the hospitalization and care of the sick, who were previously housed in various scattered hospices for the city. The decision of its construction took place in the aftermath of the conquest of the Duchy of Milan by Francesco Sforza, with the aim of winning the favor of the new subjects with a monumental work of public utility. The foundation stone was laid on April 12, 1456, following the decree with which the Duke donated to the city the large land on which the hospital would rise.

The initial project was conceived by Antonio Averulino called Filarete, a Tuscan architect summoned to Milan by the Duke on the recommendation of Cosimo de ‘Medici. The choice of the Tuscan architect, also in charge of the reconstruction of the Sforza castle, testifies to Francesco’s desire to equip the city with a building built according to the most advanced construction techniques, for which at the time Florence was considered the most avant-garde city. Also from Florence, in fact, the project of the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova was sentto be used as a model. Filarete’s project included a large quadrilateral with internal courtyards; it is widely described in his treatise on architecture, composed from 1460 to 1464.

However, its construction was only partial since in 1465 he left Milan, and the execution was carried out by Guiniforte Solari and starting from 1495 by his pupil and son-in-law Giovanni Antonio Amadeo. These carried out the Filaretian project with considerable modifications to adapt it to the still late Gothic Lombard taste, such as the replacement of the round single lancet windows with the pointed double lancet windows in the façade of the main facade. The construction started from the right wing towards the Church of San Nazaro, which still has the original terracotta facade produced by the Curti furnace. It went on fairly quickly, and as early as 1472 the hospital began to function. After Solari died in 1481, the work continued under the Amadeo until the fall of the Sforza dynasty in 1499. He was responsible for the decision to adopt Angera stone as a construction material to replace terracotta, in what would later become the Courtyard of the Richini. Following the fall of the Sforza dynasty, the works stopped completely due to lack of funds.

The seventeenth-century factory
The central body of the building takes its name from the merchant Pietro Carcano who, at his death in 1624, left part of his wealth (a huge amount) to the hospital for the following sixteen years; with this it was possible to continue the enlargement under the direction of the engineer Giovanni Battista Pessina assisted by the architects Francesco Maria Richini, Fabio Mangone and the painter Giovanni Battista Crespi, called the “Cerano”. While resuming the initial project, the works were modified giving as a final result the current overlap between Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque style.

The erection of the central square courtyard, called “del Richini”, the church of the Annunciation on the back side of the courtyard itself, and the main access portal are due to this construction phase. By the will of the hospital chapter, both the decoration of the Front on Via Festa del Perdono and that of the main courtyard take up the Renaissance decorations made over a century earlier by Amadeo and Solari.

In 1639 the altarpiece by Guercino with the Annunciation to which the place is dedicated is placed on the altar of the church. For the whole following century the construction of the cruises of the north wing continued, towards the ancient lake of Santo Stefano, once used for the unloading of marble for use by the Duomo factory, and then became property of the hospital itself, until to its burial in 1857.

The nineteenth-century completion
Finally, on the left there is the more recent wing, built in the late eighteenth century thanks to the testamentary bequest of the notary Giuseppe Macchio. Under the direction of Pietro Castelli the works were completed in 1805. The construction thus completed continued to perform its function as the major hospital of the city of Milan until 1939, when the patients were transferred to the new building built in Niguarda.

The ravages of war and the target shift
During the Second World War, between 15 and 16 August 1943, the structure was severely damaged by bombing, which destroyed entire wings of the complex. The damage was repaired at the end of the war by recovering the original material as much as possible. Its reconstruction is considered a masterpiece of restoration. The University has officially been here since 1958.

Description
The building that was born as the Maggiore Hospital (Ca ‘Granda), was one of the most significant works of Filarete in Milan, as well as a paradigmatic example of the Lombard Renaissance taste before the arrival of Bramante (1479). The style is hybrid, marked by clear lines, but softened by a certain decorative richness, without an extremely rigorous application of Brunelleschi ‘s “grammar of orders”.

The Ospedale Maggiore, commissioned according to the will of the new prince Francesco Sforza to promote its image, clearly shows the inequalities between the rigor of the basic project, set up to a functional division of spaces and a regular plan, and the lack of integration with the minute surrounding building fabric, due to the building’s oversizing. The plan of the hospital, although completed over four centuries, substantially respects what was designed by Filarete in the mid-fifteenth century. It is quadrangular; the main entrance leads into a vast central courtyard, called Corte del Richini, which communicates with two identical courtyards on the right and left, in turn divided by two internal orthogonal arms which further subdivide them into four vast courtyards. The right wing, located to the south, was built in the fifteenth century, the central courtyard was erected by Richini in the seventeenth century while the left wing, north, built between six and seven hundred, was rebuilt after the war with substantial contemporary forms.

In the elevations, the rhythmic purity of the succession of round arches of the courtyards, derived from Brunelleschi’s lesson, is counterbalanced by an exuberance of the terracotta decorations (largely due to the Lombard continuers).

The main facade
The monumental central portal divides the main façade into two equal parts, almost three hundred meters long, which looks onto Via Festa del Perdono. The oldest part, raised in the fifteenth century, is the right wing, the construction of which was started by Filarete to whom we owe the portico with round arches resting on stone columns, raised on the high base. Instead, the imaginative terracotta decorations on the upper floor are due to the brothers Guiniforte and Francesco Solari. They include the elaborate arched cornice, and the arched mullioned windows, to which in the seventeenth century the characteristic stone rounds with protruding busts were added.

The central part of the façade was built in the seventeenth century, consisting of the Baroque portal and the two symmetrical wings that branch off from it, constituted on the ground floor by a portico whose arches, walled, house ogival mullioned windows. Although built in the Baroque period, the façade repeats the fifteenth-century decorative styles, by the express will of the Chapter of the hospital, who entrusted the project to Richini and Mangone. The expressionist stone busts, and the two-order portal crowned by a tympanum, are typically Baroque in taste. The statues that adorn it represent, on the lower floor, the two most celebrated Milanese saints, San Carlo and Sant’Ambrogio, and on the upper floor the Annunciata, to which the hospital was originally dedicated, made in 1631 by Giovan Pietro Lasagna, sculptor of the Veneranda Duomo factory.

The neoclassical Macchio wing follows, on the left, in dark red plaster interrupted by simple pilasters, which encloses the eighteenth-century wing rebuilt in contemporary forms after the war damage.

The courtyards
The main entrance leads directly into the vast central courtyard, or “del Richini”, built by the latter in baroque forms. In derogation from the original Filaretiano project, which provided for a rectangular courtyard occupied in the center by the church of the Annunciation, it was instead erected with a square plan of dimensions almost double to those initially planned. Richini, in the construction of the courtyard, demolished the portico already built by Amadeo over a century earlier on the south side, but reused its decorative elements. Of them it is possible to see, in the center of this side, the two medallions with the Annunciation, damaged by war. The records of the hospital factory mention the numerous stonemasons, many of them coming from the Duomo factory, used in the 1920s in the vast realization of the decorations, capitals, sub-arches, plant and grotesque motifs of the frieze and above all the busts emerging from the tondi with Saints and characters from the old testament, many of which were recomposed after the war destruction in the 1950s.

The court, heavily damaged by the bombing, was entirely rebuilt by recomposing the eighty arches that make it up with the original pieces. On the right of the main courtyard is the Renaissance wing, consisting of four courtyards identical in size, but with different decorations. They appear as square-plan cloisters, the sides of which are made up of two orders of superimposed loggias, supported by thin stone columns. The rear courtyards, called “della Ghiacciaia” and “della Legnaia”, gutted by the bombs of 1943, were only partially rebuilt. The two western cloisters, called “della Farmacia” and “dei Bagni”, retain their original forms,

Thanks to some sponsorships, the restoration of the main facade and the monumental portal on via Francesco Sforza, which should end in the period 2009-2012, is underway and the realization of a “planned conservation plan” for the courtyard of honor; Furthermore, between 2009 and the first months of 2010 there were interventions on the porch of the courtyard of Pharmacy and on the heavier friezes of the courtyard of honor, invisibly strengthened to eliminate the risk of collapse.

The Historical Archive and the Art Collections of the Ospedale Maggiore
The monumental halls of the “Chapter” of the hospital are preserved in the rear part of the court by Richini, that is the hospital board of directors that met in these places until 1796. The main hall, decorated in the seventeenth century by Paolo Antonio Maestri Volpino, today houses the Historical Archive of the Hospital, while in the adjoining rooms the vast Art Collection of the Ospedale Maggiore is preserved, including the famous Picture Gallery of benefactors, portraits commissioned from 1602 to the twentieth century, and collections of paintings, sculptures and objects of art that have come to the hospital’s property with the legacies of benefactors.

The church of Santa Maria Annunciata at the Ospedale Maggiore
The church, without a façade, was instead built on the back side, distinguishable from the square lantern, which rises above the arches of the loggia. It took the name of Santa Maria Annunciata at the Ospedale Maggiore. Some design drawings of the cult building, by the hand of Richini, are still preserved. The entrance, without emphasis, takes place from a common portal in the center of the portico at the bottom of the court of Richini. The interior has a square plan, while the four identical sides are made up of serlianas supported by marble columns and Ionic capitals that recall the external courtyard. Of particular interest is the altarpiece, commissioned to Guercino in the 1930sfrom the chapter of the hospital to be placed on the main altar where it is still located. The work shows an articulated and moved compositional structure, and accents of heated realism that can be seen in the pictorial rendering of the angel’s robes, and in the unusual iconography of God the bald father who protrudes from the clouds.

Crossing the threshold of the Church of the Annunciation there are three marble bas-reliefs, works by Dante Parini, Vitaliano Marchini and Francesco Wildt. The subject is common to the three artists: “The healings of Christ”.

Below the church there is a low crypt, whose arched vaults are supported by powerful square pillars. It preserves little remains of the original fresco decoration, which disappeared due to humidity, in addition to the unadorned altar. It was used over the centuries as an ossuary for the hospital dead who were buried in the thousands. In particular, it also housed the bodies of the fallen of the five days of Milan, later transferred under the monument specially erected by Grandi in the square of the same name. Numerous names of the patriots still buried inside remain on the walls.

The rear front of the hospital, now on via Francesco Sforza, originally looked onto the circle of canals. Once the old port of the hospital has disappeared, today the Porta della Meraviglia remains, from which you could access the bridge that led to the ancient cemetery of the main hospital, today called Rotonda della Besana. On the head of the cruise is the small fifteenth-century portal decorated with an Annunciation by Luvoni.

Art collections of the Maggiore Hospital
The art collections of the Ospedale Maggiore are an artistic collection owned by the Maggiore hospital of Milan, consisting of a series of portraits of the benefactors of the hospital, considered the main and most valuable nucleus, and other collections of various nature , currently located in the historical site of the hospital, Ca ‘Granda, now the headquarters of the State University of Milan.

The portraits of the benefactors

Origins and historical development of the collection
The collection of portraits began in the fifteenth century, immediately after the establishment of the hospital by Francesco Sforza (1456). The intention was to pay homage to the illustrious personalities who have committed significant acts of liberality towards the hospital. The frequency of these gestures of gratitude was however limited to those who distinguished themselves both by personal prestige and by the exceptional nature of the benefits bestowed, either economically or in the form of political or religious concessions.

On the other hand, from the 1600s onwards, portraiture became a more widespread habit among the wealthier social classes, and this was reflected in the frequency with which the hospital granted this honor to its benefactors. Not only that, in those years the requirement of social prestige fell: to be portrayed could be all those, illustrious or not, who had rendered particular benefits to the hospital.

The trend continued over the centuries, so much so that in 1810 it was established that depending on the size of the donation or bequest, you had the right to a portrait of different prestige: with 40,000 lirethe right to a half portrait was acquired, with 80,000 lire the full-length portrait could be had. This venality on the one hand made the intentions dictated by convenience over those for the purpose of pure liberality prevail among benefactors (and the large amount of donations to the minimum amount necessary for the honor shows this), but at the same time it generated a significant increase in bequests and a consequent drastic enrichment of the artistic collection. Another effect of this policy was the custom of leaving sums that would allow multiple portraits, for the benefactor and his relatives.

Following the First World War, a strong devaluation and the failure to adjust the expected figures generated a further increase in donations and therefore of the portraits made. Since then, however, the economic requirements for being entitled to portraits have been raised and periodically updated.

The choice of the painters to whom the entrusting of the portraits was entrusted was not bound before the twentieth century to any precise rule: the decision was made by the Council, but the will of the benefactor or his heirs was generally taken into account. In 1906 a special Commission was set up consisting of eminent Lombard artistic personalities, and choices were delegated to it. Characters such as Luca Beltrami, Carlo Bozzi, Ettore Modigliani, Aldo Carpi and Mario Sironi sat in committee.

The Commission was also charged with solving the age-old problem of the correct placement of the works, a problem made particularly difficult by the enormous increase in paintings made since the beginning of the 1900s. Before then, the portraits were exhibited every two years in the courtyard of the Ca ‘Granda, home of the hospital, on the occasion of the Festa del Perdono. But this solution, in addition to allowing exposure for one day every two years, became less and less viable over time due to the large number of works and the limited space. Pope Pius XIhe warned: “to make portraits is not enough: you have to exhibit them permanently and decently, so that they are an incentive to donate”. With the transfer of the hospital to the areas where the Policlinico and Niguarda Hospital currently stand, the administration of the hospital in 1940 assigned the cruise “Macchio” to display the collection, despite the outburst of the conflict. In 1942 the new installation was dismantled for precautionary reasons, saving the collection from the bombing that hit the Ca ‘Granda hard in the night between 14 and 15 August 1943. Nowadays, an adequate accommodation has not yet been found for the collection, which currently amounts to over 900 portraits.

Peculiarities of the collection
The practice of hospitals to pay homage to their benefactors spread throughout northern Italy since the Middle Ages: examples are the Vigevano Civil Hospital, the Sant’Antonio Abate Hospital in Gallarate, the San Giovanni Hospital in Turin, the Civil Hospital of Alessandria and the Sant’Andrea di Vercelli Hospital. Of less historical and artistic importance are the collections of other hospitals in Italy and Europe, such as the Hospital of Santo Spirito in Rome or those of Spoleto and Geneva. However, the Ca ‘Granda collection represents a unicumas for size, historical continuity and importance of the authors present.

The picture gallery of the hospital also represents an interesting cross-section in the history of fashion and Lombard customs of past centuries, also due to the heterogeneity of social extraction and professional role of the characters depicted. Finally, the portraits constitute a unique iconographic source, also given the absence in Italy of “portrait museums” such as the National Portrait Galleries of London, Canberra, Edinburgh, Ottawa or Washington, for the physiognomic knowledge of the protagonists of Milanese and Lombard history.

The works of the fifteenth century
Among the works of the fifteenth century, two large canvases commissioned in 1470 by the obscure painter Francesco Da Vico (or Di Vico) are worth mentioning, both commemorating the birth of the hospital: the first represents the Dukes Francesco Sforza, founder of the hospital, and Bianca Maria Visconti, her consort, kneeling in front of Pius II, with the facade of the Ca ‘Granda in the background. The second shows their firstborn Galeazzo Maria Sforza with his wife Bona di Savoia, kneeling in front of an altar in the act of delivering money in the presence of Sant’Ambrogio, always with the facade from the Ca ‘Granda in the background. The subjects portrayed in this second painting, however, do not correspond to what is evidenced by the contract stipulated with the painter, nor does it appear that the two spouses have ever paid money or other benefits to the hospital; being the founder and his wife already dead at the time of the execution, it cannot be excluded that they were the subjects portrayed and that upon their death the painter, by higher order or spontaneous flattery, changed the faces in homage to the new Dukes .

The works of the sixteenth century
Among the works of the 16th century, a Portrait of Marco Antonio Rezzonico della Torre, who arrived at the hospital, of which Rezzonico was also a councilor, together with his entire legacy, is worthy of mention. The painting was attributed to Titian on the basis of the conspicuous inscription in the lower part of the canvas (” Tiziano Vecellio made in Venice in 1558 “; another inscription, almost illegible, to which the subject’s hand seems to refer, indicates in 1557 the date of execution), but also in consideration of the fact that in a letter of 1758 in which the councilors of the hospital asked the Archbishop of Milan to bring their satisfaction to the new Pope Clement XIII, to the century Carlo Rezzonico, we remember that at Ca ‘Granda there is a portrait of his ancestor by “the famous Titian”. However, the inscription turned out to be false and it was probably this that misled the councilors. The portrait was attributed by Paolo D’Ancona to Paris Bordon, but even this hypothesis is not unanimously accepted, while the contextualization of the 16th century Venetian school is certain .

The other, not numerous, fifteenth-century portraits are generally executed half-length or half-figure and present the characteristics of austerity and simplicity typical of the Milanese cultural and social environment of the time: “an age that aimed at classical composure of life “.

The works of the seventeenth century
With the seventeenth century and the spread of portrait fashion among the most affluent social classes, there was a significant increase in the quantity of the collection: about eighty new portraits entered the hospital collection. The paintings belonging to this century have a certain stylistic uniformity: the austerity of the previous century is replaced by a taste for sumptuous costumes and refined background settings, typically Baroque and Spanish and strongly influenced by Flemish painting. The most followed formula becomes the full-length portrait. Among the authors to whom the hospital turned, above all we remember Andrea Porta, Fede Galizia,Carlo Francesco Nuvolone, Salomon Adler and Giacomo Santagostino.

The works of the eighteenth century
The eighteenth century was less profitable than the previous one in terms of quantity (sixty-one portraits are preserved) and in many respects it was a continuation without stylistic peculiarities. The influence of Flemish painting was flanked by that of English painting, which can be observed above all in the presence of glimpses of urban views and landscapes used as a background, characteristics which were in any case not foreign to Lombard painting of those years. In this temporal segment of the collection, four portraits by Antonio Lucini and twelve by Anton Francesco Biondi stand out, painted between 1774 and 1801: the last two in chronological order already show neoclassical tendencies andempire .

The nineteenth-century works
The 19th century represented another moment of strong increase in the collection. More than two hundred portraits belong to this era, testifying to all the main pictorial currents of the century: neoclassicism, romanticism, impressionism and divisionism.

The highest moment of neoclassicism present in the collection is probably touched by Portrait of the priest Francesco Bossi executed between 1821 and 1822 by Pelagio Pelagi, in which “not only the artist has perfected the exterior features, but in that face, with golden reflections, managed to embody an ideal of mildness and candor ».

Examples of Francesco Hayez ‘s “first romanticism”, consisting of a “neoclassical style in which color comes back to life”, are three paintings made between 1816 and 1823, when the painter was still young but already accompanied by a discreet reputation: these are the portraits of the priest Carlo Calvi, the count Giambattista Birago and the count Pietro Francesco Visconti Borromeo.

The groups of works by Giuseppe Bertini (seven of them, including the Portrait of the lawyer Giuseppe Calcaterra, a painting that “tells, without making content”) and by Sebastiano De Albertis (still seven, in which the usual “impressionistic ease” with which the author treated his famous battle scenes gives way to a more austere romanticism), as remarkable are the contributions of Angelo Inganni, Giuseppe Molteni and the brothers Domenico and Gerolamo Induno.

There is no trace of the most revolutionary current of Lombard romanticism, that represented by Tranquillo Cremona, Daniele Ranzoni and the early works of Gaetano Previati, testifying to that fundamental choice of favoring artists linked to a contained, austere, realism in line with the Lombard tradition and therefore more pleasing to the families of benefactors, a choice that will be much more evident in the artistic policy of the Commission in the following century .

Of the final phase of the nineteenth century there are paintings by Giovanni Segantini (of whom the hospital also preserves, in its other collections, the important Portrait of Francesco Ponti made in 1986 by Antonio Rotta, Emilio Gola, Le capinere, Gaetano Previati, Emilio Gola, Pompeo Mariani and Mosè Bianchi.

The works of the twentieth century
The twentieth century was a moment of further expansion of the portrait collection, with more than 500 new pieces.

The works of the twentieth century are characterized, especially for the first three decades of the century, by their loyalty to traditional and late-nineteenth-century artistic canons, dictated by the needs of families and by the requests of the Commission, established in 1906, eager to respect precise pictorial canons and rigorous. The consequence was the almost total exclusion of those more avant-garde and controversial pictorial currents, starting from Futurism. Significant contributions were given to the collection by painters such as Filippo Carcano, Emilio Gola, Cesare Tallone, Ambrogio Alciati, Riccardo Galli, Eugenio Giuseppe Conti and Anselmo Bucci.

From the late 1920s a clear predominance of the twentieth-century component in the artistic policy of the Commission emerged. It was found from 1929 to be composed of characters such as Giuseppe Amisani, Achille Funi, Esodo Pratelli, Mario Sironi, Aldo Carpi, all personalities touched in one way or another by the demands of the “Novecento” movement. In addition, the same setting of the collection, devoted to traditionalism and respect for the portrayed figures, the peculiarity of the work of the artists, called to make portraits of the deceased having only old photographs as models, and therefore unable to give readings of the subject particularly imaginative, as well as the tendency to use the work of almost always Lombard painters, ended up by prevailing in the approval of the Commission and the families those artists who proved to be participants or at least respectful of the twentieth century model: Piero Marussig, Giovanni Borgonovo, Pompeo Borra, Mario Tozzi, as well as the same Ropes, Sironi and Carpi. However, there were also examples of commissions to artists unrelated to “Novecento” and participating, with greater or lesser involvement, in the more disengaged clarism: Umberto Lilloni, Cristoforo De Amicis, Francesco De Rocchi, Carlo Martini, Francesco Menzio and others.

From the second half of the twentieth century, such a uniformity of artistic politics was lost, but the traditionalist and figurative setting remained, with important sculptures such as the bust of Bianca Maria Sforza in marble by Dante Parini, with paintings by Leonardo Borgese, Trento Longaretti, Silvio Consadori, Renato Vernizzi and many others.

The collections

Origins and evolution of the collections
The collection of works of art began with the first stages of the history of the hospital in the 16th century and lasted uninterruptedly until the present day. There were mainly three ways to enrich the collection.

First, the “concerns of the wise administrators” over time generated a certain accumulation of goods of artistic value, such as the ancient furnishings of the hospital pharmacy (the so-called “spezieria”), a famous Egyptian papyrus, the banner of the body and numerous illuminated parchments.

Other occasions for enriching the artistic heritage came with the annexations of other Milanese hospitals, such as that commissioned by Cardinal Enrico Rampini and implemented by Francesco Sforza in the mid-fifteenth century. Each of these hospitals had a church or chapel, with the necessary set of sacred furnishings and furniture, which ended up enriching the hospital collection from time to time.

The main instrument of wealth enrichment was however made up of donations and testamentary bequests from the numerous benefactors. The first of a certain importance was that of Cardinal Carlo Borromeo, which included, among other things, the Adoration of the Magi by Titian, later purchased by his nephew Federico and donated to the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana.

The legacy considered most important is considered to be the one received in 1804 by Count Giacomo Sannazzari della Ripa, who left his important collection of paintings by succession to the organization, including, inter alia, the famous Marriage of the Virgin of Raphael, purchased two years earlier. by Giuseppe Lechi, Napoleonic general who had freed Città di Castello from papal rule, receiving the work as a sign of gratitude. The wedding was however sold only two years later to the state property, due to economic difficulties and in compensation of some tax debts, and therefore placed at the Pinacoteca di Brera.

In 1899 the Duchess Eugenia Litta tied the church of Santa Maria delle Selve in Vedano al Lambro to the hospital and a vast land adjacent to the Royal Villa of Monza, on which she had built a hall in which the large family archive of the family was gathered. Litta, consisting of scrolls, manuscripts and about forty portraits of family representatives. In memory of the painter Camillo Rapetti, who designed some portraits of benefactors for the hospital, in 1938 the widow donated about sixty paintings. Finally, in 1943 the heritage was enriched by the legacy of the sculptor Achille Alberti, whose art collection included more than two hundred works by Andrea Appiani, Sebastiano De Albertis, Domenico Induno, Mosè Bianchi and others. A very special donation was that of the famous Egyptian papyrus.

Many works, even significant ones, have however been alienated or dispersed over the centuries. Among them, in addition to the Marriage of Raphael, the Head of Christ sold at the Pinacoteca di Brera, attributed to Leonardo da Vinci and considered a study for the Last Supper, as well as some paintings by Giovanni Bellini, Marco d’Oggiono, Ambrogio Figino and others.

Currently, excluding the portraits of the benefactors, these remaining collections amount to over 1900 pieces including paintings, sculptures and objects of various kinds.

The works

Paintings
Among the paintings, the most consistent part is that consisting of works of sacred subject. In particular there is a nucleus consisting of paintings depicting the Annunciation, the hospital being built with the name of the SS. Annunziata and the internal church of Ca ‘Granda being dedicated to it: among them, the most important is undoubtedly the one executed by Guercino in 1638-39. Among those of profane subject stands out a Berenice in the act of cutting her hair, drawn vigorously and attributed to Bernardo Strozzi, and some of the many portraits donated by Eugenia Litta and executed between the XVIII and XIX century. Finally, the large canvas by Giovanni Segantini entitled is worthy of mentionThe capinere.

Particular is also the painting commonly called the Festa del Perdono in the courtyard of the Ospedale Maggiore, but which in reality represents nothing more than a common moment of hospital life. Anonymous and executed perhaps between the end of the XVII and the beginning of the XVIII century, it is a work to which no particular artistic value is recognized. It is however an interesting source of knowledge on the styles and customs of the time, so much so that it was certainly studied by Francesco Gonin for the illustrations of I promessi sposi.

There are also works by Defendente Ferrari, Vincenzo Civerchio (uncertain attribution), Moretto da Brescia, Francesco Rizzo da Santacroce, Giovan Battista Trotti, Ippolito Scarsella, Giulio Cesare Procaccini, Pierfrancesco Mazzucchelli, Johann Carl Loth, Palma il Giovane. (uncertain attribution), as well as numerous unknown authors.

Sculptures
In addition to the numerous sculptures that form an integral part of the Ca ‘Granda, among which some pieces by the Milanese sculptor Dante Parini, the terracotta of Francesco Solari and placed on the southern portal of the building, from the Litta collection and related to the hospital in 1899: two Madonnas with the Child, one left on the portal of Santa Maria delle Selve in Vedano, and another whose remarkable workmanship and expressive features recall the works of Giovanni Pisano, and a Bust of Cardinal Alfonso Litta of unknown author.

The Book of the Dead
In 1854 the mummy of the scribe Ptahmose and the book of the dead which was kept in the sarcophagus were donated by the son of the Marquis Carlo Busca, Egyptologist and explorer. Before the papyrus could be studied thoroughly, it disappeared, to be found several years later in an underground; in the meantime the mummy was sold to the Egyptian Museum of the Castello Sforzesco.

The papyrus, first studied by Karl Richard Lepsius, is almost intact and in excellent condition. It concerns the scribe Ptahmose, whose name is too common to identify its identity, son of Osiry and Didia, defined as “dancer of Amon “. The scribe and the mother are repeatedly portrayed in an attitude of prayer, while numerous scenes with boats and other characters embellish the document. In addition to the 42 judges of the underworld, with whom souls must plead their cause, some deities are depicted, including Anubis, Thoth, Osiris and Isis. The document is believed to be of Theban originand which dates back to the 14th century BC.

Illuminated scrolls
Numerous documents from the Visconti and Sforza periods are preserved in the hospital’s vast archival heritage, embellished with miniatures that testify to the transition from Gothic to Renaissance. Even the characters with which these documents are drawn up show the alternation of calligraphic styles in the different eras.

The “spezieria”
It is a collection of about 180 pieces including ancient decorated pharmacy jars, bronze chiselled mortars and ancient recipes on parchment from the hospital pharmacy. Among the vases, a series of thirteen pieces from the 16th century stood out, dispersed among the museums of Cambridge, Hamburg and Castello Sforzesco. For the rest, these are pieces of the ‘600 or’ 700 coming from the factories of Albissola or Venice .

The banner of Gio Ponti
In 1927 the idea of creating a hospital emblem emerged. The project was commissioned to the architect and designer Gio Ponti, who created a real banner: on one side stands the sign of the “Ca ‘Granda”, surrounded by shields representing various facts and events in the history of the institution and surmounted by the weapon of the Municipality of Milan; on the other side, it is a representation of the Annunciation with a modern taste. The work, although not entirely completed, was presented with a ceremony in the Duomo of Milan in the presence of Cardinal Ildefonso Schuster .

University of Milan
The University of Milan (abbreviated as UniMi and also known as Statale) is an Italian state university founded in 1923. It is the largest university institution in Milan and Lombardy. The headquarters is located in the Renaissance building of Ca ‘Granda, commissioned by the Duke of Milan Francesco Sforza. It is the only Italian university to be part of the LERU (League of European Research Universities).

The University of Milan (Italian: Università degli Studi di Milano, Latin: Universitas Studiorum Mediolanensis), or University of Studies of Milan, known colloquially as UniMi or Statale, is a higher education institution in Milan, Italy. It is one of the largest universities in Europe, with about 60,000 students, and a permanent teaching and research staff of about 2,000.

The University of Milan has ten schools and offers 140 undergraduate and graduate degree programmes, 32 Doctoral Schools and 65+ Specialization Schools. The University’s research and teaching activities have developed over the years and have received important international recognitions.

The University is the only Italian member of the League of European Research Universities (LERU), a group of twenty-one research-intensive European Universities. It consistently ranks one of the best universities of Italy, both overall and in specific subject areas.

One Nobel laureate in physics, Riccardo Giacconi, as well as one Fields medalist, Enrico Bombieri, studied at the University.