From 19 September to 11 January 2026, the Civic Museums of the Visconti Castle of Pavia will host the major exhibition “Pavia 1525: the arts in the Renaissance and the tapestries of battle” which, through the works of great masters such as Leonardo da Vinci, Ambrogio Bergognone, Bernardino Zenale, Pietro Perugino, will offer 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 exhibition was organized as part of the events for the five hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Pavia (February 24, 1525), an epochal event that marked the history of Europe, the first major clash in which firearms were decisive for the final outcome and which opened a new chapter in the events of Italy and the Old Continent. The strength of the exhibition is the spectacular visual representation of the battle, offered by the seven monumental tapestries of the Museum and Royal Wood of Capodimonte in Naples, all exceptionally loaned for the occasion, woven in the years 1528-1531 by the Flemish manufacture of Jan and Willem De Moyen on 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 will then be reunited in the city that inspired them, after a major restoration and three major exhibitions in the United States, to return 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 will be 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 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.
The exhibition is divided into two main sections. The first is dedicated to exploring the extraordinary historical-artistic moment that the city of Pavia experienced in the Renaissance between the end of the fifteenth century and 1525. The second section, deliberately separated to signify the break that the war marked compared to previous years both for Pavia and for the Duchy of Milan, and for the political balance of the entire peninsula, is entirely dedicated to the exhibition of the seven monumental tapestries.
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.
The curators of the exhibition are Francesco Frangi, Pietro Cesare Marani, Mauro Natale, Laura Aldovini and, for the tapestry section, Carmine Romano and Mario Epifani for the Capodimonte Museum. The scientific committee is chaired by Annalisa Zanni, former Director of the Poldi Pezzoli Museum in Milan, and includes some of the leading experts of the Renaissance period and in particular, in addition to the curators, Marco Albertario, Rosario Maria Anzalone, Stefania Buganza, Pier Luigi Mulas, Edoardo Rossetti. They are joined by other experts who have contributed to the catalogue, including Sylvain Bellenger, Thomas P. Campbell, Andrea Di Lorenzo, Luisa Giordano, Cecilia Paredes.
The exhibition itinerary
The exhibition opens with the figure of Donato de’ Bardi, a painter active mainly in Liguria, but who proudly signs himself “PAPIENSIS”, evoked in the exhibition as a precursor of the development of Renaissance art in Pavia and the foundation for all Lombard painting of the fifteenth century.
The nuclei around which the route develops are: the Certosa, the Duomo, the city. A section is dedicated to the extraordinary construction site of the Certosa di Pavia, the most emblematic of the ambitious projects of the dukes in their second capital. In its magnificence of marble and altarpieces, the Certosa was – at the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries – a pivotal site for Lombard art, also due to the presence of the leaders of the region’s art, such as Bergognone, and some of the greatest Italian masters of the time, first and foremost Perugino.
Another section focuses on the reconstruction of the cathedral of Pavia. The enterprise was the consequence of a real movement of civic pride that saw the people of Pavia, the prelates residing at the court of Rome and the lords of the duchy engaged in financing the construction of a church that was wanted to be more beautiful than Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. The result was an extraordinary competition of artists on the Pavia scene, including Bramante, Leonardo, Francesco di Giorgio Martini and others who were commissioned to take care of the project. Their presence had significant repercussions on the ranks of local artisans and artists, as evidenced by the monumental wooden model preserved in the Castle – one of the highest testimonies of Renaissance carpentry. In addition to the Prevedari Engraving, the very rare print made from a design by Bramante, some very precious drawings by Leonardo have been loaned, which evoke the master’s stays in Pavia – for example on the occasion of the start of the construction of the Cathedral – with studies on churches with a central plan, on the horses of Galeazzo da Sanseverino and on the theme of the ancient equestrian statue of the Regisole, with sheets exceptionally loaned from the Royal Collections of Windsor.
Other sections are dedicated to the production of Pavia artists engaged in painting, wood sculpture and miniatures, aiming to make visible the reverberations of this lively conjuncture in local figurative production. Thus the personalities of painters such as Bernardino Lanzani, Bartolomeo Bonone, the so-called Master of the Deposition of Pavia, the Master of the Stories of St. Agnes, and those of master carvers such as the De Donati brothers and Giovanni Angelo Del Maino, an artist who was among the noblest interpreters of wooden sculpture in Italy in the early sixteenth century, are presented for the first time.
Following an ascending climax, the path culminates in the last large room of the exhibition, where the public will be able to enjoy a real ‘immersion’ in the phantasmagoria of the representation of the Battle offered by the seven tapestries of Capodimonte, within which the various characters and key moments of the historical event that changed the fate of Europe will be grasped – thanks to a special educational apparatus.
In the same Visconti Castle, visitors will also be able to find another opportunity to learn more about the Battle of Pavia with the multimedia exhibition still in progress and open until December 29, 2025, with the possibility of an integrated discounted ticket.
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue published by Dario Cimorelli Editore.