Museum of international stature, the Pinacoteca di Brera was officially established in 1809, although a first heterogeneous collection of works was already present starting from 1776 - and expanded in the following years - with educational purposes, alongside the Academy of Fine Arts wanted by Maria Theresa of Austria. The corpus was in fact to constitute a collection of exemplary works, intended for the training of students. When Milan became the capital of the Italic kingdom, the collection, by the will of Napoleon, was transformed into a museum that intended to exhibit the most significant paintings from all the territories conquered by the French armies. Brera therefore, unlike other great Italian museums, such as the Uffizi for example, does not arise from the private collection of princes and aristocracy, but from the political and state one. Starting from the nineteenth century, also following the suppression of many religious orders, paintings requisitioned from Lombard churches and convents converged, to which were added works of identical origin taken from the various departments of the Italian Kingdom. This birth explains the prevalence, in the collections, of sacred paintings, often of large format, and gives the museum a particular physiognomy, only partially attenuated by subsequent acquisitions. The Pinacoteca collects some of the greatest masterpieces of Italian and foreign artists from the fourteenth to the nineteenth such as Piero della Francesca with the Pala Montefeltro, Andrea Mantegna, (Dead Christ), Raphael, (the Marriage of the Virgin) Bramante, (Christ at the Column) Caravaggio (the Supper at Emmaus) as well as Tintoretto, Giovanni Bellini, Rubens, Van Dyck and Francesco Hayez. In 1976 and again in 1984 they become part of the collection of paintings and sculptures of the twentieth century, thanks to the donation of Emilio and Maria Jesi, whose collection includes among other masterpieces by Picasso, Boccioni, Modigliani, Arturo Martini, Marino Marini, Morandi , Carrà, de Pisis. The corpus of twentieth-century works will expand with the Vitali donation and subsequent purchases (Arturo Martini, Giacometti). In the courtyard of honor that is the entrance to the Palazzo di Brera, the bronze of Napoleon as Mars Peacekeeper by Antonio Canova stands out, commissioned by the viceroy Eugenio de Beauharnais starting from the marble original.