Castel Sant'Angelo, Farnese Halls return to visit, completely refurbished

All of the Farnese Rooms located on the upper floors of the National Museum of Castel Sant’Angelo, all of which have been refurbished, will be open to the public again from December 13, 2022. They are named after Alessandro Farnese, who became pope under the name Paul III in 1534 and transformed the upper part of the castle from a fortress to a sumptuous residence, with the desire to renew the grandeur of Rome and of the pontiff himself. For the decoration, in the 1540s, the pontiff used several artists, especially the Tuscan painter Piero Buonaccorsi, known as Perin del Vaga, and his workshop. The pope had the smaller but equally valuable rooms decorated, which today reopen with new arrangements.

Thus the Hall of Perseus, the Hall of Cupid and Psyche, the Hall of the Hadrian, the Hall of the Festoons, and the Cagliostra, with frescoed friezes inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Apuleius’sGolden Ass extolling the virtues of Paul III and the soul’s path of spiritual elevation to salvation, or show monuments of ancient Rome, festoons and grotesques, repeatedly bearing the feats and emblems of the House of Farnese, the lily and the unicorn. The Perseus and Cupid and Psyche rooms also have perfectly preserved painted wooden ceilings, the work of Perin del Vaga and his collaborators.

The various rooms now house the museum’s Quadreria, as well as some sculptures, with an arrangement that follows a chronological path; most of the works on display are part of two important donations, that of Mario Menotti in 1916 and that of Alessandro Contini Bonacossi in 1928. Among the most important paintings are the Polittico degli Zavattari, a significant example of Lombard Gothic painting datable to the mid-15th century; Lorenzo Lotto’s San Girolamo nella selva, painted when theartist was in Rome around 1509, Dosso Dossi’s Bagno, Luca Longhi’s Young Woman with Unicorn, in which Giulia Farnese, sister of Paul III, is perhaps recognizable, and finally the Madonna and Child, Angels and Saints from the late activity of Luca Signorelli. Standing out among the sculptures are the 15th-century wooden group of the Lamentation over the Body of the Dead Christ and the terracotta Pietà of Emilian ambit, also from the 15th century. There is no shortage of rare and precious objects, such as the Spinetta, a mid-sixteenth-century musical instrument decorated with grotesques.

On the occasion of the reopening of the rooms, a guide to the Farnese rooms and the works on display was also published, edited by art historian Michele Occhioni.

Castel Sant’Angelo is a very complex structure, used for centuries with different functions: born as the tomb of Emperor Hadrian, who died in 138 AD, it then became a fortified residence, prison and finally a museum. To give visitors a better understanding of the monumentao’s history, a permanent educational exhibition has been set up in the so-called Lower Armories, illustrating the building’s continuous changes through a series of models, made in the first half of the last century, numerous ancient prints, paintings and period photographs. An explanatory guide to the narrated itinerary in the rooms of the Lower Armories, edited by Michele Occhioni, Mariastella Margozzi, and Laura Salerno, has also been published for this display.

Nestled within the walls of the Cortile delle Fucilazioni, at the foot of the imposing Hadrianic mole, the 18th-century Cappella dei Condannati, originally a portico used as a gunpowder storehouse, later transformed into a chapel between the 18th and 19th centuries and remodeled several times, with the installation of decorative elements of perusal, is also returned to the public after years of oblivion. In order to endow the museum with a multipurpose space for events, lectures, video projections and education, the Chapel Re-functionalization project by architects Federico Lardera and Egidio Senatore of larderArch studio was accepted, whose concept stems from the very name of the former chapel, which evokes the drama of the condemned prisoners imprisoned in Castel Sant’Angelo.

The new project, offered free of charge to the Museum, is thus a synthesis of these ancient dark atmospheres of the Castle and of a series of narrative and artistic quotations linked to the site, which re-emerge through the lyrical power of Giacomo Puccini’s celebrated opera Tosca, which finds its most famous aria E lucevan le stelle and its tragic epilogue right here. The space has been imagined as a “technological little theater,” in the dominant colors of gold and red, on which acoustic cylinders stand out, scenographically hovering between the bays of the Chapel, recalling the candles that once accompanied the last prayers of the condemned. In the five arched stained-glass windows are placed large vitrines citing Piranesi’s Carceri d’Invenzione.

Castel Sant'Angelo, Farnese Halls return to visit, completely refurbished

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