Museo Bagatti Valsecchi, Milan

Museo Bagatti Valsecchi is a historic house museum housed in Palazzo Bagatti Valsecchi on Via Gesù. Its remarkable idea was to make the residence itself part of the collection: brothers Fausto and Giuseppe Bagatti Valsecchi expanded their family palace and shaped its architecture, fixed decoration, furnishings, and artworks into one unified Renaissance-inspired setting. The result is not simply a gallery of paintings, but a home designed to make every element belong to the same imagined period.

You can see the character of that project in the rooms and in the objects gathered for them, including works by Giovanni Bellini, Gentile Bellini, Giampietrino, and Lorenzo di Niccolò. The brothers also built a serious library, with treatises on architecture and decorative arts, museum catalogues, and European journals. The house opened to the public in 1994, and the Bagatti Valsecchi heirs established its private foundation in 1974 to present the Renaissance and neo-Renaissance collections.

Palazzo Bagatti Valsecchi was acquired by Regione Lombardia in 1975. Today the museum remains one of Europe’s most important and best-preserved house museums, and since October 2008 it has belonged to Milan’s network of house museums.