Civic Museums of the Visconti Castle, 19 September 2025 – 11 January 2026
“PAVIA 1525: THE ARTS IN THE RENAISSANCE AND THE TAPESTRIES OF THE BATTLE”
Curated by Francesco Frangi, Pietro Cesare Marani, Mauro Natale, Laura Aldovini and for the tapestry section: Carmine Romano and Mario Epifani
The initiative is organized by the Civic Museums of Pavia and the Promoting and High Coordination Committee for the Five Centenary of the Battle of Pavia composed of : Municipality of Pavia, Monte di Lombardia Foundation, Cremona-Mantua-Pavia Chamber of Commerce, University of Pavia, with the precious support of Intesa Sanpaolo, Cariplo Foundation and Bracco Foundation.
Through the works of great masters such as Leonardo da Vinci, Ambrogio Bergognone, Bernardino Zenale, Pietro Perugino, the exhibition offers a prestigious and unique testimony of the splendid artistic and cultural flowering that Pavia experienced in the Renaissance. In one of the most iconic periods in the country’s history, the city was in fact an extraordinary artistic, political and cultural crossroads between Northern Europe and Italy.
The strength of the exhibition is the spectacular visual representation of the battle, offered by the seven monumental tapestries of the Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte in Naples, all exceptionally loaned for the occasion, woven in the years 1528-1531 by the Flemish manufacture of Jan and Willem Dermoyen to designs by Bernard van Orley, to celebrate the victory of Charles V’s imperial troops over the French army led by King Francis I.
The tapestries are brought together in the city that inspired them, after a major restoration and three major exhibitions in the United States, to give back to the public the complete visual narrative of the battle, immortalized with a pictorial and symbolic sensibility of surprising modernity.
A distinctive feature of the exhibition is that of building a real dialogue between paintings, drawings, sculptures, illuminated manuscripts and decorative art objects from prestigious Italian and international institutions such as the Pinacoteca di Brera, the Castello Sforzesco in Milan, the Veneranda Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence, the Certosa di Pavia and its museum, the Musée d’art et d’histoire in Geneva, the Royal Collection in Windsor and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.
For the occasion, a magnificent polyptych has been recomposed in the exhibition itinerary, which the Lombard master Ambrogio Bergognone created for the Certosa and whose panels are now divided into different places and properties. Thanks to the support of the Bracco Foundation, it will be possible to benefit from the results of the non-invasive diagnostic analyses conducted on some panels of the polyptych by a team of experts from the University of Milan, the IUSS-Pavia spin-off DeepTrace Technologies and the La Venaria Reale Conservation and Restoration Center.
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue published by Dario Cimorelli Editore.
The extraordinary sixteenth-century inlaid and painted wooden choir from the church of San Marino in Pavia, specially restored and set up at the Civic Museums, will also be presented to the public.