Placed in 1837 in the spaces of the Albertina Academy of Fine Arts, the Pinacoteca was established with openly didactic purposes, as attested by the two important nuclei that compose it from the beginning: the picture gallery of Archbishop Vincenzo Maria Mossi of Morano, with over two hundred paintings, and the collection of fifty-nine sixteenth-century cartoons by Gaudenzio Ferrari and his School, donated by Carlo Alberto. The one and the other nucleus had in fact, by the explicit will of the donors, an integral part of the artistic education of the students.
The first five rooms are dedicated to the paintings of the Mossi di Morano collection, with artists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries of the Florentine school, such as Filippo Lippi, and Piedmontese, such as Martino Spanzotti and Defendente Ferrari; Caravaggio painters such as Bartolomeo Cavarozzi and Mattia Preti; Flemish and Italians of the seventeenth century and landscape painters of the seventeenth-eighteenth century.
The following room marks a sort of hinge between the Mossi donation of Morano and the rooms dedicated to the history of the Academy, in fact it hosts copies of famous paintings - by Caravaggio, Guido Reni, Rubens - which creates a sort of Olympus of the Masters considered excelled in the classicist and academic culture.
The second part of the exhibition is dedicated to the works of masters and students of the Turin Academy of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and to other important donations and acquisitions, followed by the Cartoni Gaudenziani, one of the most important collections in the world of sixteenth-century drawings.
To complete the offer, important temporary exhibitions and events are regularly organized in the rooms of the Pinacoteca.