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Italiano
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(click the photo to enlarge)
 Baciccio Self-portrait oil on canvas, 73,8 x 60 cm  Gian Lorenzo Bernini Blood of Christ, oil on canvas, 98 x 64,5 cm  Sassoferrato, St. Lucy, oil on canvas, 66 x 48,5 cm
The Fagiolo Collection
The Fagiolo Collection, exposed in the museum areas on the second floor, has been donated to the
Chigi Palace by the art historian
Maurizio Fagiolo dell'Arco
as a starting point for the creation of the first Baroque Museum. The collection, begun thirty years ago,
is a look into the still little- studied Roman baroque painting.It is constituted of a number of paintings, as well as about twenty books illustrated by the same painters, which supply panoramic overview of the artistic situation of one of the more important epochs of Italian art and at the same time mirror the tastes of a historian that has contributed much to our knowledge of the 1600's. A century which in the matter of a few years went from Mannerism to the light of Caravaggio, from the Baroque to Rationalism, all the time dealing with the dialectic between sacred and profane. The collection contains works of Cavalier d' Arpino, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Pietro da Cortona, Baciccio, Andrea Sacchi and Andrea Pozzo, as well as canvases by their students, like Ciro Ferri, Giacinto and Ludwig Gimignani, and Giuseppe Passeri. And then paintings by French or Flemish artists who stayed in Rome, like Jean Lemaire, Jan Miel, Borgognone, Jacques Stella. One curiosity is a series of three portraits by Giovan Maria Morandi, representing Cardinal Francis Albizzi in various stages of his life. Works that document, as only a careful student can, aspects which had been ignored by great critics and absent from public museums. This exhibit also inaugurates a wing of the second floor of the palace that had never been accessible to the public, except for Giuseppe Rotunno's filming of some scenes of The Leopard by Luchino Visconti. In these years in fact the Chigi Palace, starting from its public acquisition in 1989 with funds of the former Foundation for the Improvement of the South (a sort of donation of Prince Augustin Chigi), has been object of restorations including those carried out for the great Jubilee, that, since December 1999, have consented the full use of the palace. |
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