Why you should experience Museo d'Arte e Scienza in Milan, Italy.
Museo d'Arte e Scienza is an unconventional private museum where Castello's collecting culture, scientific examination, Asian and African art and a physicist's fascination with forgery converge inside a nineteenth-century Renaissance Revival palace.
Set along Via Quintino Sella near Foro Buonaparte and just steps from Castello Sforzesco, the museum occupies Palazzo Bonacossa, built by Antonio Comini beginning in 1894 as the surrounding district changed alongside Luca Beltrami's immense campaign to recover the former Sforza fortress from centuries of military use. Comini wrapped the residence in deeply worked stone and bifore, drawing its lower rustication from Ferrara's Palazzo dei Diamanti and its upper composition from Florentine Renaissance palaces such as Palazzo Strozzi. Inside, microscopes, magnifying lenses and specialized lighting place paintings, ceramics, furniture, ivory, silver, books, tapestries and carpets under close examination, turning an art collection into an unusually participatory encounter with age, technique and workmanship. The result is a private museum where a palace built during Milan's late nineteenth-century architectural revival houses an institution devoted to questioning how closely an artwork itself carries the physical evidence of its creation.
What you should know about Museo d'Arte e Scienza.
Museo d'Arte e Scienza is best known for Gottfried Matthaes's decision to build a museum around the problem of distinguishing authentic works of art and antiques from later copies and forgeries. The Dresden-born physicist came from a family immersed in collecting and painting, with his aunt Gertrude Matthaes and Walter Kurau establishing a painting school in Dresden in 1906 before moving it to Berlin in 1927 and receiving work connected with rooms at the Pergamon Museum in 1930. Gottfried spent years pursuing a more dependable means of dating the more than 1,000 wooden objects in his own collection, then left industry in 1990, acquired two floors of Palazzo Bonacossa and created the Museo didattico per l'accertamento del falso nell'antiquariato. The institution organized the question of authenticity by physical category, moving through canvas and panel paintings, excavated ceramics, furniture, amber, ivory, silver, prints, books, tapestries and carpets so differences in construction and aging became central to the encounter with each object. Matthaes joined that educational project to the Arte Autentica laboratory, directed by chemist Peter Matthaes and specialized in spectroscopic dating. The museum subsequently changed names twice, passing through Museo del Collezionista d'Arte before adopting Museo d'Arte e Scienza as its scientific work and collections expanded beyond the original investigation of forgeries. Matthaes consequently turned a private collector's doubts about his own objects into an institution organized around the physical boundary separating an original work from an imitation.
A second transformation began in 2001 with the inauguration of the African art section, shifting the institution beyond its original concentration on authentication into permanent displays of non-European art. The African collection grew to more than 300 objects from different cultures across sub-Saharan Africa, joined by a major Buddhist art collection centered particularly on works from Thailand and Burma. Matthaes also developed a Leonardo program connected to the artist's Milanese years, including a reorganized presentation of the Treatise on Painting that arranged Leonardo's writings by subject and paired them with artworks, photographs and reproductions. The scientific operation expanded internationally in 2008 when a second laboratory opened at Nonnenhorn near Lindau in Germany under Martin Matthaes, extending the institution's analytical work into Northern Europe. Gottfried died in 2010, after which Peter and Patrizia Matthaes assumed leadership and established the Friends of the Museum association during the same year. The African and Buddhist collections, Leonardo project, German laboratory and succession to the founder's children transformed Matthaes's original experiment into a multigenerational institution connecting collecting, art history and scientific analysis.
How to fold Museo d'Arte e Scienza into your trip.
Museo d'Arte e Scienza works as the anchor for a daytime progression through the Sforza court, Milan's oldest Benedictine convent and the surviving Roman defenses absorbed into that religious complex centuries later.
Begin at Castello Sforzesco, whose first fortress arose under Galeazzo II Visconti between 1360 and 1370 before the Ambrosian Republic partially demolished it and Francesco Sforza began rebuilding after taking Milan in 1450. Galeazzo Maria Sforza and Ludovico il Moro subsequently turned the stronghold into a Renaissance court associated with Leonardo da Vinci and Bramante, but foreign rule converted the residence into a military installation under Spanish, Austrian and French governments. Luca Beltrami reversed that trajectory from the 1890s, recovering Sforza decoration, restoring the Rocchetta and Corte Ducale and reconstructing the lost Filarete tower, inaugurated in 1905 after the original had collapsed in 1521. Continue to San Maurizio al Monastero Maggiore, attached to Milan's most important Benedictine female monastery, whose existence reaches the eighth or ninth century. The present double church separates the public nave from the enclosed nuns' choir, and its sixteenth-century decoration includes Bernardino Luini's cycle in the Besozzi chapel and a mechanical organ built by Gian Giacomo Antegnati between 1554 and 1557. Conclude inside Civico Museo Archeologico, where the former monastery preserves a 24-sided Roman defensive tower rising 16.6 meters and a section of the city wall built during the late third or early fourth century as Emperor Maximian's presence stimulated the enlargement of imperial Milan. Another Roman tower associated with the late imperial circus survived through conversion into San Maurizio's bell tower, allowing architecture created for imperial performance to persist inside a medieval religious institution. The progression moves from a Visconti fortress becoming a Sforza court through a Benedictine monastery accumulating Renaissance painting and music into Maximian's Roman fortifications surviving inside that monastic fabric, exposing successive mechanisms of preservation within the territory surrounding Museo d'Arte e Scienza.
Where your story begins.
Foresyte Travel reveals places that feel extraordinary long before you arrive.
Experience premium editorial crafted for luxury travelers.
