The important Trivulzio Collection, in the family palace, opposite to St. Alessandro, can only be visited by permission of the owner, Prince Trivulzio. It contains a fine Mantegna—the Assumption of the Virgin—painted in 1497; Portrait of a Man, by Antonello da Messina; Birth of the Virgin, by the Siennese Sano di Pietro; Madonna and Angels, by Pier’ di Cosimo, etc., and a very interesting portrait of Lodovico il Moro, by Boltraffio. Here is also preserved the Gothic tomb of Azzo Visconte, originally in S. Gottardo, and some splendid tapestries—the Twelve Months of the Year—of the Renaissance period, and of Lombard production. The fine library is rich in the possession of a manuscript by Leonardo, known as the _Codex Trivulziana_, and of a fragment of the precious _Libro di Gesù_, in which are portraits of Lodovico il Moro and his son Massimiliano, aged five, miniatured by Ambrogio de Predis. The other private collections not being open to the public hardly come within our province; we may perhaps be permitted to mention Signor Crespi’s (Via Borgo Nuovo), a particularly fine collection, which has been fully illustrated in a monograph by Sig. Adolfo Venturi, with reproductions of the pictures.[24] It contains the very fine portrait of a woman, variously ascribed to Titian and Giorgione, but given by Venturi to Pordenone; a very interesting early Correggio—the Presepio—and a small Madonna, by the same master; a Madonna of Gio. Bellini, also an early work of great beauty; a Holy Family, by Lorenzo Lotto, in which the Virgin is one of his most subtle presentments of feminine character; the Flight into Egypt, also by Lotto; Victory of the Gonzaga over the Buonacorsi, with a very interesting view of Mantua, by Domenico Morone; a fine portrait of a man attributed to Andrea Solari, but, according to Venturi, by Bartolommeo Veneto. The Milanese school is also well represented, and there are many other works of value. Footnote 24: _La Galleria Crespi._ The well-known connoisseur, Dr. Gustavo Frizzoni, also has a small, but very choice collection of pictures, chiefly of the North Italian and Venetian schools. CHAPTER XVI _The Castello_ “La miglior fortezza che sia è non essere odiato dal popolo.”—MACCHIAVELLI. In the west of the city a vast red brick building, towering against the sky, closes the wide vista of the modern Via Dante. It stands for that storied stronghold and palace of the Visconti and Sforza, the Castello di Porta Giovia, whose rapidly vanishing remains, mutilated, ruined and buried beneath the additions and incrustations of five centuries of changing circumstance, have been very recently dug out and restored and rebuilt into the present interesting semblance of the fifteenth century original.