The painting comes from the Florentine church of Santa Maria del Carmine where Filippo Lippi had taken his vows. The artist's training took place in that place, attending the construction site of the Brancacci chapel decorated by a host of Tuscan artists. Among these, the master Masaccio left an indelible imprint on the young friar, clearly recognizable in the spatial construction that characterizes the Madonna of Humility. The composition is dominated by a strong plastic system to which the figures are subjected, arranged to form a sort of pyramid between a narrow strip of garden and the vault of the sky that forms the background. The structure has its focal point in the volume of the Virgin who, seated, holds a sturdy Child in her arms with her eyes turned towards the viewer. Crowned by two groups of wingless angels and some saints of the Dominican order: on the left Angela of Bohemia, on the right Angelo da Licata, who bears the sign of martyrdom on his head, and Alberto of Sicily, who holds a branch of lilies. The 2013 restoration has finally healed the areas compromised due to the transfer of the paint film onto the canvas, after the elimination of the original support on the table. The painting, which arrived in Milan in 1831 with the dowry of Marianna Rinuccini, wife of Giorgio Teodoro Trivulzio, entered the property of the Pinacoteca with the purchase of the collection of Prince Luigi Alberico Trivulzio in 1935.

The purchase of the large canvas and the pendant Il Molo verso la Zecca with the column of San Teodoro in 1995 gave a qualitative leap to the evidence of the Venetian school preserved by the Pinacoteca. The two views offer an unsurpassed narrative synthesis, and fix in harmonious balance the virtuosic reproduction of the famous monuments of the lagoon city and the affable representation of a humanity busy in everyday life. To achieve this truth, the artist only partially used the mechanical instrument of the optical camera, managing to mentally construct the views. The elegant carved and gilded wooden frames accompany the canvases from the time of the commission, promoted by 1742. The perfect state of conservation and the absolute autography frame the two views among the masterpieces preserved in the Castello Sforzesco.

The lively scene of the Verziere is freely inspired by a place, sung by the Milanese poets, the site of a centuries-old daily sale around the religious fulcrum of the Colonna del Redentore. According to a usual practice in gender frameworks, the Mercato del Verziere is an interesting collective working document. We do not know the name of the quadraturist who painted the architectural backdrops, nor of the still life painter to whom we owe the precise depiction of a myriad of objects, including fruit stands, vegetables and food placed on the market. Another collaborator has placed extras, but the snappy figures obtained from a filamentary brushstroke, recognizable starting from the second row up to the character of the Redeemer, are by Magnasco's hand. These pictorial traits are also found in the two Storms (inventories 1331,1332) that flank the work in the Pinacoteca, typical evidence of the artist's fertile, imaginative visual imagination.

Also this painting bears in the title the homage to one of the most important founders of the Pinacoteca, Count Gian Giacomo Attandolo Bolognini, in whose Milanese home there were almost two hundred paintings, all donated to the city of Milan. The work proposes a much requested theme and treated in different variations by the great Renaissance masters. In this early version, Correggio has in mind the lesson of Leonardo, whose sentimental values he assimilated, and of Raphael, from whom he took the pyramidal structure of the composition. The marble pilaster, a reference to the classical world, introduces the intimate and reflective representation that unites the Madonna with her son and St. John, connected by simple gestures and the intense exchange of glances. Besides the figures, the landscape plays a not secondary role, and offers a view probably close to the painter's native land. The soft tones of the colors, the intensity of the shaded areas, the serene composure of the figures insinuate a strong feeling of panic in the religious subject.

Born in Venice, the painter sought work in other regions, accepting positions offered both by religious bodies and by exponents of the nascent Italian bourgeoisie. Only in the last century did critics recognize Lorenzo Lotto as an extraordinary innovator, particularly in the portrait genre. The Portrait of the Pinacoteca offers full evidence of this, depicting a young man distracted from reading a "Petrarchino", a small volume that contains the lyrics of Francesco Petrarca. Everything contributes to familiarizing us not only with the young man's behavior, but also with the psychological nuances that seem to pierce and wrinkle the epidermis of the face. This ability to grasp the sudden change of feelings by fixing them in indelible features remains a prerogative of the Venetian artist. The identity of the young man is unknown, just as there is no news of the work in the accounts that the artist wrote meticulously in a diary. Only the stylistic data leads us to propose a dating between 1524 and 1526.

The picture, painted around 1744, is part of a small but extraordinary nucleus of agricultural landscapes and urban representations of northern Italy. The series is very important for the precision of the views and for the unusual choice of subjects, captured with a pre-enlightenment spirit; it testifies to human industriousness capable of interacting in harmony with the environment. In the canvas, the original vertical cut offers the opportunity to frame a place that is still the nerve center of the Lombard city, home to monuments of considerable importance for Milanese civil history. The artist's particular sensitivity can be seen in the choice of the formal construction and in the use of color: the deep shadow area in the center of the scene and the large score of the sky bring out the complex articulation of the buildings. Among these there is an artery, the current Via Mercanti, frequented by groups of workers and passers-by. The work, purchased in 1998, completes the different genres of the view preserved by the Pinacoteca.

Only in recent years has the work been attributed to Francesco Galli, known as Neapolitan, one of the lesser known personalities among painters who assimilated Leonardo da Vinci's innovative poetics thanks to his frequentation of the Milanese construction sites promoted by Ludovico il Moro. The suggestion that Vinci was the author of the painting dates back to at least the mid-eighteenth century, when the restorer Robert Picault wrote the artist's name on the back of the work. In the picture of the Pinacoteca, there are many themes that refer to iconographic and stylistic solutions painted or drawn by Leonardo. Among these, Neapolitan's interpretation of the female face emerges which seems to overlap the second version of the Virgin of the Rocks (London, National Gallery). The title that identifies the painting is a tribute to the figure of Amedeo Lia who wanted to sell one of his most cherished assets to the city of Milan in 2007. An intrinsic value links the painting to the Sforza residence: behind the religious scene the facade of the fortress it is represented in its structure rich in descriptive details, providing an irreplaceable iconographic memory of the Milanese monument at the end of the fifteenth century.

The canvas adorned the ceiling of the Chapel of San Giovanni Battista obtained in the Palazzo dei Giureconsulti. The building and the other architectural monuments located in Piazza dei Mercanti housed the most important public offices in Milan. The decoration of the chapel with stuccos, marbles and canvases is one of the rare commissions promoted by the civil community who wanted to dedicate the pictorial cycle to the two patron saints of the city, the Baptist and Saint Ambrose. The position of the large canvas imposes the view from below up, and the compositional cut testifies to the great scenographic mastery achieved by Morazzone and his Baroque interpretation of space. Pentecost appears in a dizzying glimpse from below, with the figures of Mary and the Apostles chained together to form a crown at the edges of the image. A luminous vortex expands in the center of the scene, a place from which the divine light radiates, the true protagonist of the painting.

In the rich legacy destined for the Municipality of Milan in 1863 by the will of Antonio Guasconi, there is the small table which, with the nickname of Madonna del Libro, has become the icon of the Pinacoteca. This painting was chosen because it is one of the most intense testimonies made by Vincenzo Foppa, the undisputed leader of the Renaissance in Lombardy. The Madonna and Child emerge peremptorily from a space that becomes real thanks to the deception of the fake frame; the open book kept for a glimpse increases the illusion of the scene depicted. The quality of the pictorial material, the very personal choice of silvery gray ranges and the expressive intensity of the figures modulated in the touching face of the Madonna and in that of the Infant Jesus are grafted onto this plant of geometric wisdom. The dimensions of the painting reveal the original use of the image, probably placed in a private room at eye level. This position made it possible to read the Latin inscription that runs along the three sides of the frame, proposing the opening words of the prayer in honor of the Immaculate Conception according to the dogma professed by Pope Sixtus V, an element that allows the painting to be dated no later than 1475. .