Sala Generale

From 11 July, visitors to the Veneranda Pinacoteca Ambrosiana will see the works in the same light with which the artists who created them saw them.

The second phase of the project, together with the architect and lighting designer Alessandro Colombini and developed by Luum, restores the original splendor to the works of rooms 2 and 7, allowing you to admire the sharpness of the details and perceive the real brilliance of the colors, but the the intervention, of a much broader scope, provides for the lighting requalification of the entire Museum, according to a new aesthetic standard of “human friendly” lighting,

Luum® allows a use of very high impact and maximum precision: it represents a new generation of “human friendly” LED light which, in addition to energy saving, reproduces light with the spectrum closest to that of natural light, a light that is aware of its influence on man’s metabolism and psychophysical well-being.

The avant-garde luum® LED sources are inserted in “custom made” lighting bodies, therefore designed ad hoc for the Museum and built using the latest components: diversified and adjustable optics, possibility to rotate on two axes at 360 °, focus and dimmability.

Room 2 houses works by fourteenth-sixteenth century artists, including some important Lombard painters, and the famous painting by Sandro Botticelli “The Madonna of the Pavilion”, while in room 7 there is a particularly interesting and rare set of works: Flemish paintings by Brueghel and Brill, collected by Cardinal Federico Borromeo – founder of the Ambrosiana -, which depict religious themes set in large landscapes, tales of the story of Christ and natural elements, all rendered with a chromatic vivacity and a refined search for detail.

A team of experts, led by the architect Alessandro Colombini, carried out an in-depth study of the pigmentation of the paintings, in order to calibrate the precision adjustment of the spectrum of the LED luminaires to be designed, with the aim of illuminating the colors of each individual work in the best possible way, to enhance their specific characteristics.

A specific color temperature – that is, a shade of white light each time sought in a different way – was conceived frame by frame and was created through a mixture of LEDs with different colors so that each piece would stand out to the maximum: the colors, the forms, the construction plans.

Through the dimming of each lighthouse, that is the possibility of dosing the quantity of light supplied, the luministic dimension that best suited the different paintings was sought.

The lighting requalification of the works kept in the Ambrosiana Art Gallery continues: Caravaggio’s “Basket of Fruit” has a place of honor in the Sala Federiciana, now in a new light. Its lighting follows that of the pages of the Da Vinci Code and other masterpieces such as “The Madonna of the Pavilion” by Botticelli, the “Madonna with Child and Saints” by Titian and many others. Thanks to the innovative “custom made” spotlights with Luum® LEDs, the light of the painting reveals the original shades of color, creating a three-dimensional effect.

The different shades of the LEDs have brought out the cold tones and warm tones of the works in the best way, without the overall image being penalized by a single shade of light.

A striking example of this are the Flemish paintings in Room 7, made by Nordic artists of the caliber of Brill and Brueghel who, in depicting subjects set in vast typically Italian and Lazio landscapes, have given their compositions tones that recreate a light that reveals itself in cold reality: the shades of washed-out grays, light greens and cerulean blues are highlighted by a particularly high color temperature in terms of degrees Kelvin; the browns and the warmer tones, less present, however, are correctly highlighted by a second component of lower gradation.

The shaping spotlights focus each beam of light on the exact size of the paintings, so as to make them emerge in a particularly effective way with respect to the background of the wall, which is kept in shadow.

The entire intervention, in addition to enhancing the collection of works of art, was conceived with a view to saving energy, reducing operating costs related to maintenance and replacement of lighting luminares.