Two extraordinary collections, two jewels of the Roman Baroque, two crucial figures in the political and cultural life of seventeenth-century Rome. The taste and passion for the arts of Scipione Borghese and Maffeo Barberini they meet thanks to an unprecedented operation that sees 50 masterpieces of Borghese Gallery move temporarily a Barberini Palace. It is here that the public will be able to continue to admire the masterpieces normally displayed on the first floor of the Gallery until June 30th, which is currently affected by the work underway for the renovation and protection of the heritage financed with Pnrr funds.
Thus, instead of placing the works in a warehouse awaiting the restoration of the spaces, the two cultural institutions have given “geographical” concreteness to the Italian museum network. The need to make the exhibition spaces more efficient and accessible becomes a virtue at the service of visitors, who in the south wing of the main floor of Palazzo Barberini, home of the national galleries of ancient art, will be able to experience an unmissable dialogue between the two collections live.
The visit would be worth it even just to see one next to the other The lady with the unicorn, coming from the Borghese Gallery, e The bakerat home in the Barberini rooms, the two masterpieces of Raffaello. The two women are now together, close, united by the mystery of their identity and by the masterly stroke of the painter who painted them 15 years apart. Among the works transported from one location to another, also the Portrait of a man Of Antonello da Messina, The Madonna and Child Of Giovanni Bellini, The Madonna with child, Saint John and angels Of Sandro Botticelli, Susanna and the elders Of Peter Paul Rubens, Sacred love profane love Of Titian And The Baptist’s sermon Of Paolo Veronese.
“An event of the highest institutional value testifying to the closeness, not only geographical but also professional, that links the two museums. Following the path traced by Scipione Borghese and Maffeo Barberini, who today would have rejoiced at this initiative, we hope that the public can admire the bourgeois masterpieces at Palazzo Barberini and celebrate this exhibition which is difficult to repeat in the coming decades”, he said Thomas Clement Solomondirector of the national galleries of ancient art.
“Italian museums are a system and efforts are being made to translate this objective into concrete projects,” he said Massimo Osanna, director of museums of the Ministry of Culture – it is a very particular moment for our museums, the pnrr is making a decisive commitment to us. We are respecting all the steps of the project, the deadlines of our museums have all been respected. Most of the museums were not adequate to the efficiency and accessibility criteria, our directors are carrying out an extraordinary job. Making these masterpieces visible means making them available in a new location, otherwise they would have been destined to end up in storage due to the works. In this way, we took advantage of a potentially uncomfortable situation by transforming it into a new research opportunity.”
