The painting, which entered the civic collections thanks to a donation in 1936, depicts a young woman with a dark dress and her shoulders covered by a transparent veil held in place by a gold brooch; devoid of setting, the portrait shows a direct, intimate and familiar tone, with the young woman staring at the beholder in the eye with a hint of a smile. The painting, of remarkable quality, has been compared to the production of the great Francesco Hayez: the skilful orchestration of colors and the intimate and sentimental tone are well placed in the Venetian's production around 1825-35. Regarding the young woman portrayed, it could be Carolina Zucchi, the woman with whom Hayez established a passionate love affair and whom the painter was able to portray in numerous paintings between 1825 and 1835, also in the guise of historical figures in paintings. of the artist, including The Last Kiss Juliet gave to Romeo (1823).

It is a traditional seventeenth-century still life composition: subject very much in vogue at the time, the theme of still life lends itself to infinite variations intended to enhance the artist's technical skills in the mimetic rendering of reality. In the Monza painting, which came to the museum thanks to an important inheritance from 1923, the figure of the pouring duck is striking, next to a woodcock and other birds and fruit arranged on a wicker basket. The work was exhibited in the Pinacoteca in 1935 as a production of the 17th century Cremonese school; in view of the reopening to the public of the Civic Museums in 2014, it has undergone an important restoration which has made it possible to regain full readability.

The painting interprets the Gospel story of the ascent to Calvary, with Jesus crowned with thorns loaded with the cross by a group of minions who crowd around him, occupying almost the entire surface of the painting. Federico Zeri proposed in 1984 to assign the work, dating it to the end of the 16th century, to Giovanni Battista Cremonini, a painter from Cento and owner of a school. It is a very widespread subject in painting between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries with a purely devotional intonation: the Christ carrying the cross intently stares at the viewer, involving him emotionally, while the soldiers who crowd around Jesus manifest a mannerist style that accentuates through the diagonals and an almost rotary rhythm the dramatic dimension of the episode.

The work is part of the large group of paintings made by Mosè Bianchi, the most important Monzese painter of the nineteenth century, on the theme of women praying inside a church. The subject offers the painter an opportunity to grasp both aspects of genre - the altar boy who turns off the lamps, the attitudes and clothes of the noble ladies - and allusions to the themes of the Risorgimento, devoid of pietistic or dull tones thanks to the solidity of the system, the skilful modulation of the lights and touches of color that liven up the penumbra of the interior. The painting is set in a church that is reminiscent of the Duomo of Monza in certain details, although it is not a faithful reproduction of it but rather the free reworking of a place full of memories, evidently frequented by the author for a long time.

The work entered the Monza civic collections thanks to the important legacy of the family in 1992: Guido Cinotti was a valid Tuscan painter active in the late nineteenth and early decades of the twentieth century, author mainly of landscapes and still lifes. He adhered to Divisionism for a period, as the painting from Monza demonstrates: the alpine subject - a pass rendered with a central perspective view of the snow-covered road - allows Cinotti to apply the technique of filamentous drafting of color, with short juxtaposed touches that enhance light and colors with a very high technical quality. The theme was also addressed by Cinotti in subsequent years, as shown by the version preserved at the Ricci Oddi Gallery in Piacenza.

The work entered the Monza civic collections thanks to the important legacy of the family in 1992: Guido Cinotti was a valid Tuscan painter active in the late nineteenth and early decades of the twentieth century, author mainly of landscapes and still lifes. He adhered to Divisionism for a period, as the painting from Monza demonstrates: the alpine subject - a pass rendered with a central perspective view of the snow-covered road - allows Cinotti to apply the technique of filamentous drafting of color, with short juxtaposed touches that enhance light and colors with a very high technical quality. The theme was also addressed by Cinotti in subsequent years, as shown by the version preserved at the Ricci Oddi Gallery in Piacenza.

Anselmo Bucci is one of the most important painters represented in the museum's collections: a native of Fossombrone, he lived most of his life in Monza, where he took his first steps as a painter and where he died in 1955. The painter played a key role in the experience of Novecento Italiano, which he founded together with Dudreville, Funi, Sironi, Oppi, Malerba and Marussig but from which he left in 1929, continuing his research independently. The painting represents a mature Anselmo Bucci and fully aware of the role now assumed in the panorama of Italian art of those years: he depicts himself within a three-quarter oval, as an artist, with a determined and confident gaze. In the background, indefinite but illuminated on the left by a window, a female figure can be recognized.

In 1881 Pompeo Mariani made a trip to Egypt in which he was fascinated by the colors and traditions of North African culture, as can be seen from this view of the countryside on the outskirts of Cairo, along the course of the Nile: the dirt road that prospectively winds in depth is crossed by some women carrying amphorae for water, while on the river you can see the traditional boats with white sails. As in numerous other cases related to the trip to Africa, this painting was also made upon returning to Italy, reworking the sketches drawn on the place and the suggestions of personal memories. The painting denotes the knowledge of De Nittis' works and compositional cuts, centered on the motif of the perspective road and the elements that expertly connect the foreground and the landscape in the background, unified by the safe use of lights and colors.

The large canvas represents one of the most demanding works by Emilio Borsa, an attentive observer of the rural reality still present at the end of the nineteenth century on the edge of the historic city center. In this case, the Borsa captures a moment of daily life at the mills then existing along the Lambro in the area of the convent of the Grazie Vecchie, an area then completely disrupted by the settlements following the end of the Second World War. The work enjoys, thanks also to a recent restoration, a very high chromatic quality enhanced by the wise use of lights and reflections on the water, while the investigation of female figures caught in the performance of quiet daily activities is placed in the vein of naturalism nineteenth-century well present in the Monza artistic production of the time.

The large canvas is one of the masterpieces of the painter from Monza Eugenio Spreafico: along a dirt road in the countryside, marked by the furrows of the wheels of the wagons, a group of young women advances towards the observer who, having finished the work, return to their homes at sunset . Often considered a sort of feminine "Fourth Estate", the painting evokes the Monza reality of the late nineteenth century, immersed in the climate of attention to the real data and social dynamism of the time, without however polemic or denunciation implications as always in the production dello Spreafico, an attentive observer with a participating gaze. The work was exhibited for the first time in 1895 in Genoa where it was on sale for the sum of Lire 3000; According to the comments of the time, it is a subject already treated by Spreafico - but not only - in similar compositions from the 1880s, subsequently taken up as evidence of the iconographic success of the model of female workers who advance while singing.

The fresco, torn and brought back to canvas, represents the moment in which Mary holds the lifeless body of her Son taken down from the cross in her arms, while the Magdalene weeps holding the legs of Jesus and Joseph of Arimathea brings the hand of the deceased to his face. Next to the group of mourners appears the figure - incongruous according to the Gospel account - of St. John the Baptist, recognizable by the robe of camel hair. At the foot of the group, in particular, a nail and the crown of thorns which, together with the presence of the Baptist, refer to the Monza location of the painting: the Baptist is in fact the patron saint of the city, while the instruments of the Passion allude to the relics venerated in Cathedral, in particular to the Santo Chiodo kept in the Iron Crown. The fresco comes from the Casa degli Umiliati - now home to the museum - from where it was torn off in 1932 when the building was used as the seat of the Royal Magistrate's Court; at the time of the posting, the authorship was attributed to Simone Peterzano, but following subsequent research and stylistic comparisons it is much more plausible that the author of the fresco is Giuseppe Meda, active in those same years in the nearby Cathedral of Monza. The painting is characterized by the elegant ways of a mannerist style drawing, with calibrated evidence of gestures and expressions and references to Michelangelo's models.

Simone Pellegrini updates in his work a primordial expressive language, charged with an ancestral force that evokes rock painting in a strongly enigmatic representation. The artist from Ancona elaborates an alphabet of signs that keep an almost magical charge intact and that, at the same time, communicate a continuous dynamism. As in the middle of the nineteenth century we witness the return of a figurative system linked to the frescoes of Italian primitives with Primitivism, so Pellegrini gives new life in the 21st century to a language of Paleolithic memory reinterpreted in a contemporary key, where stylized men and animals mix with effects of refined graphic decorativism that renounces the lively chromatism, evoking bare walls of rock engraved by clear grooves. The work comes as a purchase prize from the "SerrOne Biennale Giovani Monza 2005" exhibition.

Signed by the great Lombard sculptor protagonist of the art scene of the second half of the nineteenth century, the piece represents a young noblewoman, elegantly dressed, with her hair tied up and a lace dress over a tight corset on the bust and decorated with bouquets of flowers. On the woman's shoulder a bird rests holding a rolled-up piece of paper between its paws, hence the name "messenger of love", since the young woman seems to turn her head towards the animal as if listening, with a pensive and melancholy gaze . The woman also wears a double round of pearls closed by a cameo with a lily and pearl earrings, according to the fashion of the time. At the moment there are no certain elements to identify the portrayed: the piece, however, comes from a deposit in the Royal Villa of Monza frequented, starting in 1868, by the then Prince Umberto of Savoy and his wife Margherita; given the high stylistic quality of the work and its provenance, it could be a romantic reinterpretation of an image of Princess Margherita or a member of the family.

The large canvas depicts a view of Strada Ferdinandea (so named on the occasion of the visit to Monza of Ferdinand I of Habsburg, later renamed Via Vittorio Emanuele in honor of the first king of Italy), created between 1838 and 1847 by gutting and rectifying a medieval urban fabric in the historic center of the city. The road, part of the Austrian military route towards the Spluga pass, appears flanked by a curtain of sober nineteenth-century buildings, some of which are still under construction; the view is taken from under the arcades of the Arengario, the medieval town hall of Monza, where the painter immortalizes in minute detail a series of "pictures" of everyday life, described with that elegant and measured tone that made the Deception one of the most appreciated authors of urban views in Lombardy in the mid-19th century.

The monumental group depicts the myth of Jupiter who, in order to conquer the young Leda daughter of the king of Sparta, turns into a swan. From the union with the god two eggs are born, from which Castor and Pollùce, the Diòscuri, as well as Helen of Troy, wife of Menelaus, and Clytemnestra, wife of Agamemnon, brother of Menelaus, were born. Arturo Martini - one of the greatest interpreters of Italian sculpture of the twentieth century - presented the plaster of Leda in 1926 at the 1st Mostra del Novecento Italiano held in Milan; from this plaster was then taken the sandstone sculpture exhibited in 1930 at the IV Exhibition of Decorative Arts in Monza, in the period in which (1929-1931) the sculptor was teaching at the local Higher Institute for Art Industry (ISIA). The work is characterized by a solid volumetric research which, thanks to the linearity of the scans and the solidity of the geometric construction, made light by the chiaroscuro passages, immediately makes it an icon, studied and reproduced on numerous occasions. Well inserted in the production of the master of the twenties, in the light of contemporary artistic research in Italy, Leda looks at primitive sculpture, at the Romanesque purity of forms, at the archaic synthesis that updates the fairytale dimension of the myth.