Portrait of Francesco Ciceri

Francesco Ciceri, an internationally renowned "physician", also worked occasionally in partnership with his uncle, in a shop on Via Ponte Vetero in Milan, selling wine and oil, to distract himself from the burdens of the profession. Affiliated to the London Medical Society, during a stay in the English capital he met the art collector Richard Pryor, who used him as an "intermediary" to purchase numerous works of art from an Italian collector, the Faustino Lechi from Brescia. The Milanese doctor by chance becomes the collection's owner, due to the sudden death of Pryor, then assigning it as an inheritance to the Maggiore Hospital, together with other assets, with a will dated 10 May 1834.