Brera Academy

In 2018 it was announced that Caserma Magenta was no longer a viable option, with the former railway yard in Via Farini now under consideration as a potential venue for the campus extension.

• Name — Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera • Type — Public • President — Livia Pomodoro • Dean — Giovanni Iovane • Students — 3,800 • City — Milan • Country — Italy • Campus — Urban • Website — www.accademiadibrera.milano.it

The academy was founded in 1776 by Maria Theresa of Austria. In typical Enlightenment fashion, it shared premises with other cultural and scientific institutions – the astronomical observatory, the Orto Botanico di Brera, the Scuole Palatine for philosophy and law, the Gymnasium, laboratories for physics and chemistry, the Biblioteca di Brera, the agricultural society and, from 1806, the Pinacoteca di Brera or art gallery. These were housed in the Palazzo Brera, which was built in about 1615 to designs by Francesco Maria Richini, and until the suppression of the Jesuits in 1773 had been a Jesuit college. • Illustration — The courtyard, with a bronze copy of Antonio Canova’s statue of Napoleon as Mars the Peacemaker

The picture gallery of the accademia, now the Pinacoteca di Brera, was started in 1806, in Napoleonic times. Large numbers of paintings were brought to Milan after the suppression of the convents by Napoleon. The façade of the church of Santa Maria in Brera of the former monastery was torn down and the nave of the church was divided horizontally; the upper floor became the Napoleonic rooms of the art gallery of the Accademia, which opened in 1809 as the Reale Galleria, and the lower floor housed the sculptures of the museum of antiquities. A Sala dei Moderni, which held contemporary works, was started in 1806 by Giuseppe Bossi. The Pinacoteca became independent of the accademia in 1882, though both remain in Palazzo Brera.

Alumni of the academy include the playwright Dario Fo, recipient of the 1997 Nobel Prize in Literature; and the Futurist painter Carlo Carrà, who also taught at the academy from 1939 to 1952. Others who have taught at the Brera include the Venetian painter Francesco Hayez, professor of painting from 1822 to 1880; and the architect and writer Camillo Boito, who was professor of architecture from 1860 to 1909, and for part of that time also president of the academy.

The Contemporary Art Library of the Academy is one of the 24 libraries in the world that own the "Treatise on Demonology, Summa verborum, numeri, temporis et spatii" by Filippo Biagioli.