The Photographic Archive at Castello Sforzesco of Milan: role and

Silvia Paoli:
The Milan Sforza Castle’s Photographic Archive: role and importance of
photography for protection and knowledge of art between 1943 and 1944
The Milan Sforza Castle’s Photographic Archive was founded in 1933 as a new institution devoted
to preservation and cataloguing of a rich collection of photographs constituted at the beginning of
nineteenth century thanks to the architect and art historian Luca Beltrami, who had an important
political and cultural role in Milan and in the unitary Italian state. His most important enterprise
was the reconstruction of Sforza Castle (1893 – 1905), that in a few years became the centre of
the City’s Art Museums.
In Italy was constituted the UNPA (Ufficio Nazionale Protezione Antiarea – National office for anti
– aircraft protection) in 1930 to study and solve problems of art protection in case of war. In
Milan, the local authorities worked together and collaborated since the second half of the thirties
to define a program for art protection. Photography had a fundamental role to document these
initiatives but above all to document the heavy damages due to the bombings of 1943 and 1944.
Milan had the 65 % of its monuments hit by the bombings, especially during the august of 1943,
such as Santa Maria delle Grazie, with the Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci, La Scala Theatre, the
Brera Gallery. Public institutions, as the Sforza Castle’s Art Museums, during the war, wanted to
collect photographs of works of art and monuments damaged by the bombings. The Director of
the Sforza Castle’s Art Museums, Giorgio Nicodemi (1928 – 1945), bought photographic campaigns
by important Italian photographers of the period, Claudio Emmer, Antonio Paoletti, Dotti &
Bernini, Giulio Galimberti, Mario Crimella, Dino Zani, Dario Gatti. They were professional
photographers, working in Milan, who promptly decided to photograph monuments after the
bombings, offering later these campaigns to the City’s authorities. They participated in the cultural
climate of the period, especially to the “modernism”, that also influenced photography, in the
passage from pictorialism to a new modern visual language. Many of their photographs were
published in important reviews of architecture like “Domus” and “Casabella”.
The Milan Sforza Castle’s Photographic Archive holds about 700 photographs related to the
bombings that hit the city in 1943 and 1944, discovered in the last years during the activity of
cataloguing. These photographic campaigns were due to the mentioned photographs, whose
biographies are well known thanks to new studies. Their acquisitions were registered in some
documents of the historical archive of the Sforza Castle’s Art Museums.
They have been also fundamental, during the restoration of the monuments, to develop new
studies about works of art discovered after the bombings, like the frescoes of Borromeo Palace
(XV century) with the Storie di Esopo, attributed to Michelino da Besozzo in 1947.
During the last few years, with the contribution of the Milan Sforza Castle’s Photographic Archive,
some of these campaigns have been studied more and presented in two important exhibitions
which took place in Milan in 2004 ( Stefano Baia Curioni (editor) Bombe sulla città, Milano in
guerra 1942 - 1944, Milan, Skira, 2004) and in 2009 (Cecilia Ghibaudi (editor), Brera e la guerra. La
pinacoteca di Milano e le istituzioni museali milanesi durante il primo e il secondo conflitto
mondiale, Milan, Electa, 2009).
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