The Bagatti Valsecchi Museum, with the patronage of the Ministry of Culture, the support of the Lombardy Region and the Municipality of Milan and the fundamental contribution of GKSD Investment Holding, from 15 October presents a selection of paintings from the Gastaldi Rotelli collection in the major exhibition entitled The seduction of beauty. Secret masterpieces between the 17th and 18th centuries, curated by the conservator Antonio D'Amico, with the collaboration of Maria Silvia Proni, curator of the Gastaldi Rotelli collection . Fifty masterpieces all together leave their usual residence for the first time to enter the neo-Renaissance environments of via Gesù and establish a dialogue with the eclectic permanent collection from the 14th and 16th centuries that the brothers Fausto and Giuseppe Bagatti Valsecchi assembled at the end of the 19th century. With this exhibition, the House Museum is configured as a "House of Collections", creating an interesting and unprecedented reflection on the role of private collecting, its history and the consequent valorisation and use in the contemporary age.

Gilda Gastaldi and Giuseppe Rotelli, passionate about seventeenth and eighteenth-century painting and attracted by the variety of themes that characterize it, at the end of the twentieth century, for about twenty years, collected an exceptional group of paintings, participating in auctions all over the world and traveling in constant search of precious works of art. This passion for collecting finds a famous antecedent in the brothers Fausto and Giuseppe Bagatti Valsecchi who, in the 19th century, gave life to the family palace in the heart of Milan, now home to the Museum, enriching it with paintings and artefacts of applied art from the 16th century, with the intent to create a residence inspired by the noble residences of the late Renaissance. This exhibition therefore aims to connect these two important collections which, albeit with different methodologies, are an expression and portrait of their creators and reflect their desire to live surrounded by art and beauty.

The itinerary of the exhibition develops in all the rooms of the Museum and the visitor is called to scrutinize the details of the paintings in the Gastaldi Rotelli collection to identify the assonances with the different thematic identities that characterize all the rooms of the Bagatti Valsecchi house. It is possible to closely observe biblical and religious images in the paintings by Giulio Cesare Procaccini, Giuseppe Vermiglio, Tanzio da Varallo and Francesco Cairo , contemplate daily life with the mystical scenes of Alessandro Magnasco, those of music painted by Giacomo Francesco Cipper known as Todeschini and Bernardo Strozzi , of the study of the cosmos, nature and landscape, made by Michele Marieschi, Luca Carlevaris and Francesco Guardi, until letting himself be captured by the courtships and banquets populated by pimps, masterfully painted by Monsù Be