Milan and Naples, the Ambrosiana Art Gallery and the Museum and Royal Park of Capodimonte: two cities and two museum institutions with deeply distinct histories and identities come together in a single joint project, Classical Collapse, by the artist Nicola Samorì. The project goes beyond the logic of a "double exhibition" to present itself as a unified cultural operation, conceived from the outset to be developed in two locations in dialogue with each other.

Curated by Demetrio Paparoni, Alberto Rocca (Director of the Ambrosiana Art Gallery) and Eike Schmidt (Director of the Museum and Royal Park of Capodimonte), this exhibition - at the Ambrosiana Art Gallery from November 28, 2025, to January 13, 2026, and at the Museum and Royal Park of Capodimonte from November 29, 2025, to March 1, 2026 - serves as a bridge between North and South, between ancient and contemporary, between the past of the great painting and sculpture tradition and its reinvention in the present.

The exhibition continues in the Ambrosiana Library, in the corridor housing the funerary monument to Gaston de Foix del Bambaia and in the Crypt.

In the rooms of the Ambrosiana Library, Samorì will address the theme of vanitas with a series of still lifes painted on marble and copper, inspired by Jan Brueghel the Elder's flower vases and Leonardo's drawings collected in the Atlantic Codex. The concept of selection and cataloging unites these works, creating a surprising resonance between Brueghel's Vase of Flowers with Coins, Jewelry, and Shells and Raphael's School of Athens: two universes constructed through the juxtaposition of presences, floral or human, confined in the same space despite belonging to different seasons or eras.

A section of the exhibition is dedicated to the Renaissance sculptor Agostino Busti, known as il Bambaia. The reliefs by Bambaia kept in the Ambrosiana are the natural root of Samorì's emptied marbles, just as they were of the excavated bodies and portraits by Adolfo Wildt, in turn a guide for Fontana's incisions, another key figure for Samorì's painting experience.

Finally, the Crypt of the Holy Sepulchre will host a series of vertical wooden sculptures, sacred representations that optically densify the forest of thin marble columns that rhythm the Romanesque space.