Reserve
The “Achille Bertarelli” Prints Collection at the Castello Sforzesco in Milan is a vast iconographic archive of works dating from the fifteenth century to the present day, of varying complexity and identity and different in aesthetic qualities, technique and end-use.
It is an institution founded in 1927 thanks to the initiative of the Milanese art patron and collector Achille Bertarelli (1863–1938), whose name it bears. Bertarelli donated his collection to the City of Milan for the declared purpose of creating the first nucleus of a prints collection that would be useful to scholars, permitting them to compare the written document against the iconographic one. This one, in his words, “forcefully triumphs over any more elaborate description”. Over the course of the decades, the Bertarelli Collection has been enhanced with countless works, particularly as far as antique, modern, and contemporary art prints and commercial art are concerned, changing from an archive of images into one of the most important centres for the appreciation of graphic expression in all of its forms, such as those succinctly introduced in broad categories in this publication: popular, artistic, book design, commercial and “design” projects.