Was Milan’s remade Palazzo Citterio worth the wait?

Even allowing for Italian bureaucracy, 52 years is a very long time to entertain an afterthought. When the Palazzo Citterio in Milan became state property in the early 1970s, its propinquity to the Pinacoteca di Brera on the Via Brera suggested possibilities. In particular, it suggested a suitable location for the display of several bequests of 20th-century Italian art, notably the fine collection of Emilio and Maria Jesi, who had lived in an apartment there.

Natura morta (1920), Giorgio Morandi. Palazzo Citterio, Milan

Over decades, the combination of official inertia, financial pressures and a deteriorating building, later revealed to be threaded with asbestos, led to a dispiriting litany of stop-go plans. It laid waste to piecemeal and ambitious architectural solutions alike, notably one proposed by James Stirling and Michael Wilford in the late 1980s; they had been approached by the Friends of the Brera, driven by Signora Rina Brion (‘a formidable matriarch’, in Mark Girouard’s words) whose late husband’s industrialist family had been Carlo Scarpa’s principal clients. Stirling suggested roofing over the central courtyard and an awkwardly compromised attic storey with a central stone column soaring up to a glazed overhead structure. More practically his firm also suggested a variety of stepped and graded options for the grounds to the rear of the building, with water features, taking visitors through the botanic garden to the Brera, to offer an all-important link between the two palatial galleries. But Stirling’s death in June 1992 closed an already foundering chapter in the commission.

Between 2012 and 2018, the EU sunk some 23 million euros into the project, aiming to amalgamate the now scant remains of the palace with contemporary ‘interventions’ and the facilities that any self-respecting and financially responsible contemporary gallery must offer its visitors and staff. But first they had to deal with the deadly asbestos.

Eventually a new approach was signalled when Mario Cucinella, whose Bologna and Milan-based practice aims to ‘rethink sustainability’ (the title of his recent RIBA lecture), was brought in. Press material refers to a recent ‘ill-fated architectural vision’ but the exact nature and timing of that episode has been expunged from the record. Too much water (and money?) has flowed under the bridge by now. Meanwhile the ‘Grande Brera’ project, with its Accademia di Belle Arti, the Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense, botanic garden and observatory, as well as the main Pinacoteca, suggests a confident nexus of the arts and sciences, within which the Palazzo Citterio must struggle to find its place. On a resonant date last year, 7 December – the feast day of San Ambrogio, patron saint of Milan – it opened, apparently meeting the deadline by less than a whisker. Seemingly it was at the dogged insistence of the recently appointed director of the Brera, Angelo Crespi, that it happened at all.

Umberto Boccioni’s (double-sided) self-portrait from 1908 on the piano nobile of Palazzo Citterio. Photo: © Walter Vecchio

Hopes for the palace rest on it being an invaluable and, potentially, key adjunct to the Grande Brera. Perhaps that role is too overwhelming for a much-depleted 18th-century palace readying itself to show a modest, if high quality, collection of early and mid 20th-century Italian art. Milan is well provided with displays of Futurist art, especially in the Museo del Novecento which opened in 2010, housed in the Palazzo dell’Arengario, a former local government headquarters from the Fascist period. By contrast the quietly baroque Palazzo Citterio seems still to be seeking a role.

The focal collection is that assembled by the Jesi family, and quite properly it is set within the fragmentary elegance of the piano nobile. An enfilade of small period rooms with pretty traces of rococo plaster overhead and well-modelled, subtly baroque door cases offer an attractive and domestic-scale setting for this collection, in which Umberto Boccioni, Marino Marini and Giorgio Morandi are the stars. (Picasso nudges in, one of a few non-Italian artists in the collection.) Thereafter, traces of the historic mansion are hard to find. But it is the circulatory pattern and inadequate signage that combine to puzzle the visitor. A wooden tempietto in the central courtyard further confuses the journey – and any sense of coherence – around the palazzo.

Riot in the Gallery (1910), Umberto Boccioni. Palazzo Citterio, Milan

The other collections, long unseen and less coherent, mixing antiquities and random mid 20th-century artworks, are not helped by the inferior setting and design gaffes. Grey-on-grey information texts are underlit and badly positioned, so that the generous material provided there is wasted. This questing visitor with passable Italian was left adrift. (English translations, offered against still paler grey backgrounds, are virtually illegible.) Given the strong competition from the Museo del Novecento, an emphasis here on the Futurists, with Boccioni hogging the limelight in his double-sided self-portrait (1908) and his Riot in the Gallery (1910), cannot entirely carry the argument for the Palazzo Citterio. After a morning at the magnificently displayed Pinacoteca, where a superb collection is enhanced further by the hang, the colour scheme and, above all, the subtle and discerning information provided, it’s a huge disappointment to be squinting at tiny font on the walls at the Palazzo Citterio.

Archival display of the Palazzo Citterio’s history. Photo: © Walter Vecchio

In that enormous awkward attic that Stirling had hoped to disguise from view with his inserted ceiling, the exhibition spaces are generous, and present a full explanation of the ambitions and guiding principles of the Grande Brera, the project of former director Franco Russoli (and now extended to the care of Leonardo’s Last Supper). The walls offer a comprehensive archive of what had begun as a Napoleonic ‘little Louvre’. Even the ghostly postmodern Stirling Wilford renderings of that notional link to the Brera through the grounds to the rear of the palace are included. Making this link a reality has always been an aspiration, and is currently promised for this spring – a little under 40 years late.