After being admired in the Milanese exhibition “Romanticism”, the beautiful “Portrait of Massimo d’Azeglio (Portrait of a Man)” from 1835, purchased in 2016 by the De Fornaris Foundation, returned home. Long considered a “Self-portrait” of the same artist and writer, after extensive research it turned out to be a painting by Giuseppe Molteni, the Lombard painter much celebrated in the exhibition set up between the two locations of the Gallerie d’Italia and the Poldi Pezzoli Museum (“our” d’Azeglio was there) which closed its doors on 17 March.

The story of the new attribution of the canvas was at the center of the review curated by Virginia Bertone set up between November 2017 and March 2018 in the Wunderkammer of the Gam. Entitled “Massimo d’Azeglio. A portrait and a mystery revealed “proposed to the public, among other works, the famous” Portrait of Alessandro Manzoni “created by four hands in the same 1835 by Giuseppe Molteni and Massimo d’Azeglio, on loan from the Braidense National Library.