In the first three decades of the XVII century the Cardinal Federico Borromeo founded and donated to Milano a Library and a Picture gallery together with a College of Doctors and a drawing and sculpture Academy: a real integrated cultural project. The focal point was the intuition that books, pictures and statues should not be simply stored, displayed and enjoyed, but they must continue to live in the interweaving of relations between people.
The Library is one of the most important worldwide, with almost 100.000 prints, 15.000 manuscripts (including the famous Codice Atlantico) in Italian, Latin, Greek, Arabic, Syriac, Ethiopian (and not only), 12.000 drawings (of Raffaello, Pisanello, Leonardo…) and other rarities (old maps, music manuscripts, parchments and papyrus). The original nucleus of the Picture gallery includes the collection of Federico Borromeo, donated by himself to the Ambrosiana in the 1618: paintings from Veneto and Lombardia of the XV and XVI centuries, Flemish and Lombard paintings of the contemporaries. In the halls of the building and in the arcades behind the Santo Sepolcro Church, decorated in eclectic style in the thirties of the XX century, there are collections of objects and paintings from XVI to XIX century, especially of Seventeenth century artists from Lombardia.