Napoleon built Brera's collection out of confiscated altarpieces, stripping suppressed churches and convents across Lombardy and the Veneto to fill a gallery worthy of his new kingdom; it opened, fittingly, on his birthday, August 15, 1809.
The building started as a Jesuit college in 1572, was rebuilt by Francesco Maria Richini in the 1620s, and later held an astronomical observatory whose dome still rises over the courtyard. Inside, Mantegna's Dead Christ foreshortens the body so sharply that the wounded feet seem to reach into the room, while Raphael's Marriage of the Virgin, signed and dated 1504, shows the artist still absorbing his teacher Perugino. Hayez's Kiss, painted in 1859 as a coded call for Italian unification, closes out rooms running from Piero della Francesca to the nineteenth century.
