The story
In the autumn of 1953, Picasso's Guernica, his painting of a Basque town destroyed from the air, was hung in a hall that had itself been bombed. The Hall of Caryatids in Milan's Royal Palace lost its roof in the air raids of August 1943. Its stucco burned, its balconies fell, and paintings by Andrea Appiani, Napoleon's court painter in Milan, were ruined. The hall was repaired without its old decoration, and its scorched caryatids still bear the marks.
The palace stands beside the cathedral, on a site where the city's rulers governed for centuries. Its present neoclassical form dates from the 1770s, when the architect Giuseppe Piermarini, who also designed La Scala, rebuilt it for Archduke Ferdinand of Habsburg, the Austrian governor of Lombardy. It later served Napoleon's Kingdom of Italy and then the Savoy kings.
Today the Royal Palace works mainly as one of Milan's principal exhibition venues, with large temporary shows each year, from Old Masters to contemporary artists. It also holds paintings of its own, among them Van Dyck's allegorical portrait of Venetia Stanley, painted as Prudence for her husband, the English courtier Sir Kenelm Digby, with a snake in one hand and doves in the other.
