Rome, Palazzo Barberini's refurbishment completed with new rooms of the primitives

The new rooms of Palazzo Barberini’s primitives open in Rome: these are the first eleven rooms on the ground floor of the museum that is part of the National Galleries of Ancient Art. Halls 1 to 11 have been completely renovated and ref urbished with an intervention curated by Flaminia Gennari Santori with Maurizia Cicconi and Michele Di Monte, concluding the project to refurbish the permanent collection of Palazzo Barberini, which began in 2019 with the rooms dedicated to the 18th century in the South Wing and those dedicated to the 17th century in the North Wing and continued in October 2021 with the new rooms of the 16th century and the completion of the new layout of the main floor of the palace. The renovated rooms on the ground floor accommodate works from the Middle Ages to the early 16th century, thus respecting the general chronological and geographical distribution pattern of the museum’s collection.

The fifty works on the ground floor are arranged in an order that interweaves and presents different levels of reading to the public: through a series of “rooms” dedicated to thematic moments and monographic insights, connections and cross-references between the works of morphological, thematic, typological, semantic, iconographic and contextual order are highlighted. Room panels and didactic apparatus illustrate the decorations and architectural elements of what was originally Prince Taddeo Barberini’s apartment, providing visitors with a valuable aid to the exhibition itinerary. Access is through the new Orientation Room (No. 1), also known as the “Monkey Room” from the ceiling decoration frescoed around 1630 by Agostino Tassi and Simone Lagi. Here, visitors will find a timeline running along the walls highlighting the main events in the history of Palazzo Barberini and the museum: a sort of “red thread” that graphically ends with an innovative multimedia table, designed to enhance the museum’s enjoyment by providing visitors with the opportunity to delve into different themes about the palace (from the protagonists of the Barberini family to the artists who worked there) and the collection (from the most important works to its formation). It can be accessed simultaneously by 5 people who can choose different paths and consult different content, in Italian and English. Completing the display is Antonio Gerardi’s painting, Maffeo Barberini presides over the reclamation of Lake Trasimeno in 1665, one of the cartoons in the series of tapestries on the Life of Pope Urban VIII, the most important produced by the Barberini tapestry workshop, probably intended for Pietro da Cortona’s Salone.

In the rooms dedicated to the oldest paintings (No. 2-3), to the right of the Orientation Room, works with a date between the end of the 11th and the first half of the 14th century will be exhibited, arranged in such a way as to highlight also their different functional destination, their use in the context of origin and the material and formal, as well as symbolic, peculiarities they entailed. Room No. 2 is dedicated to the panel of the Madonna Advocata dating to the end of the 12th century (it is the oldest work in the museum) from Santa Maria in Campo Marzio and to the characteristic type of the Italian painted cross, with four examples datable between about 1200 and 1260, including the cross owned by Jacorossi, attributed to the circle of Alberto Sotio (active in Spoleto in the 12th century) restored on the occasion of the new display. These works are structurally similar, but precisely because of this they allow for a better appreciation of different iconographic solutions, from the hieratic image of Christus Triumphans to the more humanly sympathetic one of Christus Patiens. In Room No. 3, the paintings, mainly gold backgrounds from the Tuscan area between the two and fourteenth centuries, are grouped in a nucleus that recalls their devotional function, the relationship with Byzantine prototypes, and the persistence of formal configurations, with varying iconographic declinations, evident particularly in the very homogeneous series of Madonnas with Child of the Sienese school, from Segna di Bonaventura (Siena, documented from 1298 to 1331) to the Master of Palazzo Venezia (active from 1320 to 1370). Also on display in the room are two carved ivory caskets from the Embriachi workshop (active in Venice, 14th century), from the deposits of the MAI (Museo Artistico Industriale).

Room 7. Photo

Room 7. Photo

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The next room (No. 4), on the other hand, marks the transition from the Late Gothic phase to the emergence of new developments in the Nordic and Flemish areas. On the one hand, the sophisticated elegance and hyperdecorative inflections of the panel paintings of the Venetians Niccolò di Pietro (active in Venice, 14th century) and Michele Giambono (Venice, c. 1420 - c. 1462) and, on the other, the essays of 15th-century Provençal and Flemish painting, where narrative needs, calligraphic taste and expressive research are joined by a new sense of the representation of space and light. In particular, the recently attributed Our Lady of Sorrows by Jean Changenet (active in Provence between 1486 and 1493) and the Ex-voto panel by Josse Lieferinxe (active in Provence from 1493 to 1503/08) show this interweaving of motifs well. Lieferinxe’s small painting, with its sharp perspective construction, anticipates and introduces the next rooms devoted to early Humanist painting, emphasizing the mutual and fruitful relationships between the Flemish environment and the Italian space. The itinerary on the eastern side of the floor ends in the Hall of Columns (Room 5), so called for the presence of the two large granite columns that were placed when the room was renovated at the behest of Cardinal Francesco Barberini and again decorated by the Maltese painter Michelangelo Marulli.

Italian painting between the 15th and 16th centuries is devoted to Rooms 6-10 to the left of the orientation room. We begin with the two important panels by Filippo Lippi (Florence, 1406 - Spoleto, 1469), the Madonna of Tarquinia and the so-called Hertz Annunciation, which now mark the adoption by Tuscan painters of the 15th century of those linguistic elements foundational to the new manner: perspective space, the recovery of the antique, naturalism. Traits that are here further highlighted in the comparison with works by other masters, still linked to forms and stylistic features that are used to qualify as “attardati,” as in the case of the Madonna and Child by the Florentine Neri di Bicci (Florence, 1419 - 1492), who died at the symbolic dawn of a new epoch, in 1492. In Room 6 the Triptych (Ascension, Last Judgment, Pentecost) by Beato Angelico (Vicchio, 1395 - Rome, 1455), the panel painting dated 1447-1448 usually kept at the Corsini Gallery, will be on display until the end of October on an exceptional basis. Room 7 showcases Central Italian painting of the early Renaissance, through the significant nucleus of works by Antoniazzo Romano (Rome, active from 1461 to 1508), compared with Lorenzo da Viterbo (Viterbo, c. 1437 - 1472) and two paintings by Perugino (Città della Pieve, c. 1450 - Fontignano, 1523). Marking the transition to the next room is the singular canvas St. Sebastian and St. Catherine, perhaps an organ door, by a painter at once eccentric and linguistically “composite,” identified as Francesco Pagano (15th century) or the Sicilian Riccardo Quartararo (Sciacca, 1443 - Palermo, c. 1506.), an expression of the Iberian-Flemish idiom that found a place in Aragonese Naples, enriched, however, by Roman experience, perhaps close to Antoniazzo himself.

Room 8 alone exhibits The Vision of the Blessed Amedeo Menez de Sylva by Pedro Fernandez (Murcia, Spain, active between the late 15th and the first quarter of the 16th century), which symbolically closes the ground floor itinerary and announces the developments of the rooms on the piano nobile, with the precise references of this monumental panel to the masters of the so-called “High Renaissance,” from Leonardo to Bramante to Raphael. Finally, Rooms 10 and 11 illustrate in parallel, conceptually and literally, the outcomes of artistic production between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries on the Adriatic side of Italian painting, from the Marches to Venice, with works by Pietro Alemanno (born in Göttweig, Austria; active in the Marches between the 1580s and 1590s), Lorenzo d’Alessandro (San Severino Marche c. 1445. - 1501), Niccolò Alunno (Foligno, active 1450 to 1502), Marco Palmezzano (Forlì, 1459 to 1539) and some followers of Giovanni Bellini. Room 9 will be designated for focus exhibitions, devoted to in-depth studies of individual works, small groups of works or specific themes.

“The project of rearranging the collection and reorganizing the spaces and routes of the palace,” says the director of the National Galleries of Ancient Art, Flaminia Gennari Santori, “has been at the center of the work of these years, and from this nucleus all the work of rethinking the National Galleries has unraveled. The result is an enormous satisfaction for all of us: we invented a museum that was not there, a place where our public reflects and keeps coming back to because they know they will always find new insights.”

Rome, Palazzo Barberini's refurbishment completed with new rooms of the primitives

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