Pinacoteca di Brera

Brera is a gallery Napoleon built. In 1809 he turned the picture collection of Milan's art academy into a public museum and filled it with paintings taken from churches and convents across the parts of Italy his rule controlled, so that the new state could show what it had gathered. In the courtyard stands Canova's bronze of Napoleon as a nude Roman god, and the academy still shares the building, which means art students pass the masterpieces on their way to class.

Those masterpieces are among the most reproduced in Italian art. Mantegna's Dead Christ lays the body on a slab and foreshortens it straight toward you, feet first, so the corpse seems to jut into the room. Raphael's Marriage of the Virgin, painted when he was 21, sets its wedding before a domed temple that recedes to a vanishing point in the open doorway. Nearby hangs Piero della Francesca's altarpiece, with the Duke of Urbino kneeling under a suspended ostrich egg.

Because it grew out of a teaching academy rather than a royal collection, Brera runs deepest in northern Italian painting, from Bellini and Mantegna through to Caravaggio's Supper at Emmaus.