This space also houses a masterpiece, the Mausoleum built around 1510 by Andrea Briosco, known as Il Riccio, in honour of the famous physicist Girolamo Della Torre and his son Marcantonio, a doctor and friend of Leonardo da Vinci.
In Pavia, Della Torre oversaw anatomical dissections, giving Leonardo da Vinci the opportunity to study the human body and create his renowned anatomical sketches. The imposing horizontal parallelepiped structure was decorated with eight bronze panels; these were removed by Napoleon’s troops at the end of the eighteenth century and are now in the Louvre. The copies still in San Fermo illustrate the stages of life and death: teaching, illness, death, purification, the journey to the Elysian Fields, and Marcantonio della Torre’s final glory.
