Nocturnes and Dialogues – Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan

I recently had the good fortune to be in Milan with an evening to spare, and decided on going to the late evening opening at the Pinacoteca di Brera.  I had been once before, last year, but hadn’t seen everything I wanted to see, and was expecting a nice evening of art appreciation.  What I wasn’t expecting, but was very happy to encounter, was a musical programme for the evening which brought the spaces to life and lent a new dimension to my experience of the Brera.

First of all I should note that the evening was very much geared to a local rather than tourist crowd.  I pretend to understand Italian but don’t really, so I lost some of the background and context which the performers were explaining to other visitors.  Nonetheless I understood enough to know that the programme was a mix of pieces which fit the period of the works around them, and modern works.  Groups of musicians alternated spaces throughout the evening, and some were inexplicably more popular than others (girls with harps good, men with woodwind instruments less so).

Some of the spaces taken over by the musicians were certainly dramatic, and gave good backdrops to the performances.  I reminded myself at one point that surely some of the period pieces they were performing had courtly origins, and were intended for very similar performances.

Taking London as a comparison, a very nice feature of the evening was how quiet everything was.  A Thursday night late opening for reduced entry price and with special events would be packed pretty much anywhere here, but I had some galleries almost to myself at the Brera.  It made the whole evening feel very civilised, and to some extent made me question why I put myself through the packed crowds of London cultural evenings…

Featured quite heavily on the Brera’s website was something entitled ‘Around Lotto: Fourth Dialogue’.  The title and website design were promising, but in the flesh the dialogue turned out to be a room of works mostly by Lotto (image below with grey walls), with the dialogue mostly silent.  Perhaps Italian audiences are sophisticated enough in terms of art and art history to make connections and enrich their understanding simply from seeing works hung together, but I must say I was hoping for a little more.  Maybe I missed something?

Another quick note on the museum itself: when I was in Milan last year the Brera was undergoing some sort of refurbishment/building work, and I did not understand at the time how much that had affected my enjoyment of it as a collection and an institution.  In hindsight I can now see that my first experience was upside down and backwards: entry was through the normal exit, several spaces were blocked off, and some key works had escaped the confusion and gone off to join temporary exhibitions.  This time the experience was as designed, the logic of the order in which the art is viewed worked, all the greatest hits were there, and I understood why the Pinacoteca di Brera is a world-class museum.  As an aside, I also really like visible storage spaces within the museum proper.

  So overall I had a great evening at the Brera!  I came out feeling cultured, invigorated, and enthusiastic about the museum and what it’s doing.  It’s playing to its strengths and in some respects preaching to the converted (in putting on evenings which appeal to its existing audience), but does it well.  To finish, here is a picture of me enjoying the Brera, sandwiched between a painting and a reflection.

    Around Lotto until 11 June.