Branda Castiglioni Palace

a time historical dwelling of Cardinal Branda Castiglioni and today stop essential to fully understand the cultural thickness of a figure so important.

Precisely in this building there are the most meaningful testimonies of his humanist thought interpreted from the skills pictorial and sculptural of Masolino and Vecchietta, which could experience the yields of perspective learned in Florence through the teachings of Leon Battista Alberti. The descendants of Cardinal contributed to enrich this heritage, commissioning family portraits and collecting precious objects of furnishing that today join the most ancient remains.

It overlooks the piazzetta del borgo antico, is constituted by two bodies of the factory of the XIV and XV century
as the fitting between the two architectural elements it was erected a third that encloses the lower plane the Chapel of San Martino and the piano nobile a stupendous and how rare Renaissance loggia with the cycle of illustrious men of an artist of the Sienese school.

The facades, in false ashlar, are refined from beautiful sandstone window and in terracotta tiles, while the coat of arms of Francesco Sforza reminds us of the ancient domain of the Duchy of Milan.
Masolino frescoed in 1435 in room indicated as "lo Studiolo of Cardinal" a wonderful and unreal landscape that local tradition wants is to "Veszprèm", the city of Hungary where the prelate was Conte and Papal Legate from 1410 and where you consolidated the fruitful friendship between the Florentine master and the Cardinal.

An unknown artist, of the Lombard school, painted instead in 1423 the so-called "Room of Cardinal" with fruit trees, putti rejoicing, decorations late-Gothic and sayings from classical Latin authors, which tell a refined spiritual testament of Cardinal Castiglioni.

Downstairs the chapel of cardinal celebrates the Heavenly Jerusalem narrated in the Book of Revelation of Saint John and the Eucharistic Mystery enunciated by the Evangelist John. The painting has been attributed to Lorenzo di Pietro, known as il Vecchietta, that the frescoed in 1437 and decorated it with small corbels in sandstone depicting angels in contemplation.