The story
Cardinal Federico Borromeo opened this gallery in Milan in 1618 as a teaching collection, attached to the library he had already founded, so that young artists could study directly from good pictures. Four centuries later the same few rooms near the Duomo still hold what he gathered.
Two things stop most visitors. One is Caravaggio's Basket of Fruit, a plain wicker basket of leaves and slightly spotted fruit against a bare ground, one of the earliest independent still lifes in Italian painting. The other is Raphael's full-size cartoon for the School of Athens, the enormous preparatory drawing, several metres wide, that was used to transfer the design to the wall of the Vatican. The library next door holds the Codex Atlanticus, the largest single gathering of Leonardo da Vinci's drawings and notes, and Leonardo's own Portrait of a Musician hangs among the paintings a few rooms away.
