Musei - Gallerie Barberini Corsini | Barberini Corsini Galleries (Episode 5)

Episode 5: The Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica or National Gallery of Ancient Art is an art museum in Rome, Italy. It is the principal national collection of older paintings in Rome – mostly from before 1800; it does not hold any antiquities. It has two sites: the Palazzo Barberini and the Palazzo Corsini.

The Palazzo Barberini was designed for Pope Urban VIII, a member of the Barberini family, by the sixteenth-century architect Carlo Maderno on the old location of Villa Sforza. Its central salon ceiling was decorated by Pietro da Cortona with the visual panegyric of the Allegory of Divine Providence and Barberini Power. The Palazzo Corsini, formerly known as Palazzo Riario, is a fifteenth-century palace, rebuilt in the eighteenth century by the architect Ferdinando Fuga for Cardinal Neri Maria Corsini.

The National Galleries of Ancient Art are a museum and two galleries: Palazzo Barberini and the Corsini Gallery which preserve over 5000 works of art including paintings, sculptures, sketches, decorative arts from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century. The heritage of the National Galleries was formed in 1883 with the donation to the State of the Corsini collection, then located in Palazzo Corsini. The collection was soon enriched with works from prestigious Roman collections, so much so that in 1949 the Italian State purchased Palazzo Barberini to open the new headquarters of the National Gallery in 1953.

The Corsini Gallery today only displays works from the Corsini collection and constitutes the only eighteenth-century collection remaining in Rome in its original context: the palace purchased by the family in 1736, under the pontificate of Clement XII Corsini. The building, famous for having hosted Queen Christina of Sweden in the seventeenth century, was transformed into a real palace by the architect Ferdinando Fuga. The recent layout of the museum has relocated the paintings exactly as they had been arranged by Cardinal Neri Maria Corsini, the first and main creator of the collection, on the basis of the 1771 inventory of the rooms. By visiting the Gallery it is therefore possible to enter the apartments of an eighteenth-century cardinal, including the famous Alcove of Christina of Sweden, and admire masterpieces such as Caravaggio's Saint John the Baptist, Salvator Rosa's Prometheus, Rubens' Saint Sebastian or the mysterious Throne Corsini.
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The gallery's collection includes works by Bernini, lla galleria comprende lavori di Bernini, Caravaggio, van Dyck, Holbein, Beato Angelico, Lippi, Lotto, Preti, Poussin, El Greco, Raffaello, Tiepolo, Tintoretto, Rubens, Murillo, Ribera e Tiziano.