“When I got here I was shocked by the dull, flat approach to lighting, which strove to recreate the sort of northern light the artist would have worked in,” he says. (Painters’ studios have historically tended to face north because light from that orientation produces the least shadow.) “That is an old orthodoxy; the prevailing fashion today is to put things in the spotlight. We speak with light and colour now.”

Most importantly, each work is labelled. “There are curators who believe the works should speak for themselves,” he tells me over breakfast at the Mandarin Oriental, the city’s newest hotel, close to the Brera. “But unless you’ve been reading Ovid [specifically Book VII of his Metamorphoses], you probably don’t know why a child is being born out of a tree,” as you wonder at the frescoes in the museum’s first gallery. For the moment there’s no clue even as to who the artist was (Bernardino Luini). “Curators have forgotten what it’s like not to know stuff. A visitor should not leave feeling stupid.”

You might want to tell James Bradburne though, that artists favoured northern light not because it cast the least shadow(?), but because it maintains a more constant colour and intensity throughout the day.  Any photographer will tell you that light from the morning sun tends to be significantly bluer than light in the afternoon, which is much yellower.

The variation plays havoc with the choice and mixture of paint on your palette, especially when it comes to skin tones (which can look too 'wet' and yellow in the morning and then too 'biscuit-dry' and red in the afternoon).  Luckily, working exclusively with northern light evens out these light temperature fluctuations, giving a skin tone which is usually just what the artist wanted, in all conditions. 

Also, if the weather changes much through the day, northern light evens out the worst of the contrast fluctuations.