CORSINI PALACE - CORSINI GALLERY (fifth part)

Room IV - Room of the Fireplace

“The room owes its name to the presence, at the time of the Corsini family, of a fireplace in Ginori porcelain embedded in the center of the northern wall, where now is Christ and the adulteress by the Venetian Rocco Marconi. Known in the documents as 'Room of Mirrors' or 'Great Room', the setting was intended to function as a cabinet: a place of study and meditation of the cardinal and private audience hall in which were received guests who arrived after crossing the magnificent gallery of representation (Room III)” (Official website of the Corsini Gallery - galleriacorsini.beniculturali.it)

At the center of the room ancient “Corsini Throne” second or first century BC

It was found in the years 1732/34 during the excavations to build the Corsini Chapel in the Basilica of St. John Lateran

Marble sculptures “Genius of Hunting” and “Genius of Fishing” by Pietro Tenerani (1789/1869)

Two small bronze statues “Diana the Huntress” and “Adonis” by the Florentine Antonio Montauti (1685/1740), sculptor appreciated by the Corsini family

“Christ and the Adulteress” by Rocco Marconi (known from 1504/d. 1529)

“It has long been debated about the role of Marconi in the artistic context of the lagoon after the conclusion of the Bellini experience, assessing the degree of reception and involvement in the trends that developed under the influence of Giorgione, Titian and Sebastiano del Piombo. Against an overall reductive judgment of the capacity of Marconi to adapt to the new guidelines, expressed by Ansaldi and Garas and taken up by De Vecchi (...), later critical opinions stood back to a position more prone not only to consider Marconi as one of the most outstanding students of Bellini (Gibbons, Tempestini, Heinemann), but also to appreciate his progressive growth in the changed Venetian environment of the twenties” (Giorgio Tagliaferro - Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani Treccani)

“The Prodigal Son” and “The Death of Abel” by Michelangelo Cerquozzi (1602/60)

“Madonna and Child” by Andrea d'Agnolo aka Andrea del Sarto (1486/1531)

“Ecce Homo” and “Penitent Magdalene” by the Florentine Carlo Dolci (1616/86)

 “Salome with the Head of John the Baptist” 1638/39 by Guido Reni (1575/1642)

“It is like a stage for the aesthetic ideal of the Bolognese painter, the undisputed champion of the seventeenth-century classicism, with carefully building lighting effects and a perfect balance of form. (...) The rarefied atmosphere of the composition typical of the Bolognese artist work between the thirties and forties, can be found in contemporary works or a little later, as Blessed Andrea Corsini of the Pinacoteca di Bologna and especially Salome at the Art Institute of Chicago, which has in common with the Corsini painting the marked pathos of the Baptist's expression” (Official Website of the Galleria Corsini - galleriacorsini.beniculturali.it)

“St. Jerome” sixteenth century by an unknown artist of the Venetian school

“Adoration of the Shepherds” about 1562 by Jacopo da Ponte aka Jacopo Bassano (about 1510/92)

“Today is unanimously considered one of the masterpieces of Jacopo's mature production. The artist adopts here a compositional model already tested in previous versions of the same subject (such as the ones at Hampton Court or at the Accademia in Venice), bringing subtle but significant variations. The role of the shepherds in the scene takes on a distinctly important central focus of the composition, all played on vivid contrasts” (Official Website of the Galleria Corsini - galleriacorsini.beniculturali.it)

“Adoration of the Magi” by Donato Creti (1671/1749)

“Ecce Homo” by Orazio Ferrari (1606/57)

Nine splendid “Heads” by Benedetto Luti (1666/1724)

“In his production of portraits, unfortunately not intense, he often reaches through an immediate pictorial style, shy of decorative tinsel and false modesty, a penetrating psychological and daring insight, full of a deep human energy” (Giancarlo Sestieri)

Four marvelous pastels by Rosalba Carriera (1675/1757) of the years 1741/43: the “Four women’s faces representing the four elements: fire, water, air and earth“

“She was very famous throughout Europe, demanded by princes and kings who assiduously attended her studio. Specialist in pastel technique, she gave to her finest portraits a mundane Rococo grace with soft and light colors and a fluffy and soft as powder touch. Rosalba's pastels found wide resonance in France: they would be taken into account also by artists of firmer mettle, such as Maurice Quentin de la Tour and Perroneau” (Carlo Bertelli, Giuliano Briganti, Antonio Giuliano)

Six small paintings on copper with “Stories of criminals” from works by the French painter Jacques Callot (1582/1635), including one with “Execution of a criminal” by Giovanni Paolo Pannini (1691/1765)

“St. John the Baptist” seventeenth century by an unknown artist of the school of Guercino

“Noli Me Tangere” sixteenth century copy by unknown artist from the original by Federico Barocci aka Barocci

“Martyrdom of St. Andrew” and large oval “Madonna and Child with St. John the Baptist” by Carlo Maratta (1625/1713)

“The paintings of this artist of extraordinary ability does not contain puzzles or anything that would shock a viewer, anything that would arouse violent emotions. His fluent way of handling the current allegorical language, the impersonal generalizations of which his work abounds, the admission of the right amount of festive splendor, all this predestined his grandiloquent style to become the courtly style par excellence in the Europe of Louis XIV. Maratta was not an artist devoted to speculation and theories” (Rudolf Wittkower)

“Portrait of Cardinal Domenico Morone” by Scipione Pulzone (about 1550/98)

“Sea Storm” and “Shipwreck” by the Flemish Bonaventura Peeters (1614/52)

Two outstanding “Heads of elderly men” by Peter Paul Rubens (1577/1640)

“In May 1600 he left for a study tour in Italy; he was first in Venice and then in Mantua where Vincenzo Gonzaga gave him the job of official court painter, a position he kept during all of the eight years he spent in Italy. (...) The art of Rubens was endless; his great talent evolved slowly and he found his own style only after his return from Italy, meditating constructively on those experiences” (Enciclopedia Treccani)

“St. Francis in meditation in the desert” by Annibale Carracci (1560/1609)

“Deposition of Christ from the Cross” sixteenth century, by an unknown artist from the Emilia region

“Mary Magdalene Penitent” by Francesco Cozza (1605/82)

“Portrait of Cardinal Alessandro Farnese” maybe by Pietro Bonaccorsi aka Perin del Vaga (1501/47)

“Portrait of Cardinal Bernardino Clesio” about 1531 by the German Bartel Bruyn (1493/1555)

“Bruyn was influenced in part, as Ragghianti says, from portraits by Raphael, but translated into a language in which the Gothic hardness is frozen in a realism severe and far, knowing, though, how to seize the pride and cunning attitude of the character in the cold and calculating eyes, stressed by the uneven raising of his eyebrows” (Sivigliano Alloisi)

“Portrait of Wolfgang Tanvelder” by Hans Maler zu Schwarz (1480/1529)

“Archangel Gabriel” and “Our Lady of the Annunciation” by Sebastiano Ghezzi (1590/1670)

“I Maccaronari (Maccaroni Eaters)” by Domenico Gargiulo aka Micco Spadaro (1609/75)

“St. Rose of Lima” by Agostino Masucci (1691/1758)

“Madonna and Child” by G.B. Salvi aka Sassoferrato (1609/85)

“Portrait of a Gentleman” by an anonymous seventeenth-century Genoese artist

“Portrait of a little girl” by the Flemish Giusto Sustermans (1597/1681)

“Cain killing Abel”, “Esau sells his birthright” and “Martyrdom of St. Stephen” by Francesco Trevisani (1656/1746)

“Revolt of the peasants” and “Looting of a village” by the Flemish Jan Baptist Van Der Meiren (1664/about 1736)

CORSINI PALACE - CORSINI GALLERY (fourth part)

Room III - Gallery of the Cardinal

“The room was built as part of the extension work of the building at the time of the Riario family, between 1590 and 1594, under the direction of the architect Giacomo Della Porta. At the time of the Corsini family it was rearranged by the architect Ferdinando Fuga and it became the representative room in the apartment of Cardinal Neri Maria, destined to the “Gallery of paintings” itself and to be the passage that guests had to walk to go to the Audience Hall (Room IV) “(Official Website the Corsini Gallery - galleriacorsini.beniculturali.it)

Lovely small bronze group “Small fauns on a goat with parrot” by the Florentine Gaspare Bruschi (1710/80)

Small bronze group “Hercules Child Strangling a Snake” by Alessandro Algardi (1595/1654)

“Christ Crowned with Thorns” and “Adoration of the Shepherds” by Giovanni Francesco Barbieri aka Guercino (1591/1666)

“Jesus and the Samaritan Woman at the Well” by an artist of the school of Guercino

“Adoration of the Magi” by Sebastiano Conca (1680/1764)

“St. Peter healing St. Agatha in prison” about 1613/14 and “Nativity scene” by Giovanni Lanfranco (1582/1647)

“Lanfranco (...) on the 23rd of August 1613 rented for a year, along with Antonio Carracci, a house in Via Paolina. (...) Dating to this period (1612/14), immediately after his return in Rome, is the altarpiece of the Salvation of the Soul for a chapel in S. Lorenzo in Piacenza (now Naples, Capodimonte), the only work in which it's possible to notice a slight temporary approach to the luminous and colorful effects of Bartolomeo Schedoni, but in which are also visible elements of Caravaggio's style. These are even stronger in S. Agatha visited and healed by St. Peter, a 'picture for a room' painted for Pier Maria Dalla Rosa” (Erich Schleier - Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani Treccani)

“View of the port of Nettuno” and “Landscape with River” by Paolo Anesi (1697/1773)

“In these small paintings nature unfolds with quiet solemnity, surrounded by a satisfied calm where the characters are perfectly at ease and don't recite the usual role of contour, but are naturally taking part of delightful scenes of everyday life. (...) The landscapes by Anesi, mostly of small size, always communicate this wonderful sense of balance, this solar and absolute contemplation” (Sivigliano Alloisi)

“Landscape with animals (the ford)” maybe by the German Abraham Begeyn (about 1636/97)

“It is unlikely to identify the author in Nicholaes Berchem, one of the most famous Italianate Dutch painters, despite some compositional elements, such as the peasant girl on the donkey and the theme of travel, are typical of his. Missing in the painting is Berchern's already almost rococo elegance and fluency. (...) The painting, however, is appreciated for a sense of humble truth and participation, for a vision not at all idealized, but real and concrete of a countryside, certainly Roman, desolate and haunted by malaria of which the two peasants show on the faces the terrible signs. Therefore I propose to assign the work to Begeyn a painter who, as well as having imitated Berchem, seems to have been in Italy” (Sivigliano Alloisi)

“Trinity”, “Portrait of his daughter Faustina represented as the Art of Painting”, “Flight into Egypt”, “Our Lady of the Annunciation” and “Archangel Gabriel” by Carlo Maratta (1625/1713)

“Carlo Maratta, after the death in 1669 of Pietro da Cortona, became the leading exponent of Roman painting. (...) He left a legacy to the artists of classical training a solid repertoire of formulas and models that would remain valid again for another fifty years” (Maria Antonietta De Angelis)

“St. Jerome” and “St. Joseph” by Guido Reni (1575/1642)

“Battle” by Salvator Rosa (1615/73)

“Adoration of the Magi”, “Adoration of the Shepherds” and “Annunciation” by Giovanni Francesco Romanelli (1610/62) from Viterbo, a pupil of Pietro da Cortona

“Wedding Contract” by Giovanni Mannozzi aka Giovanni da S. Giovanni (1592/1636)

“Martyrdom of St. Bartholomew” by Emilio Savonanzi (1580/1660)

“Holy Family” 1516 by Bartolomeo di Paolo del Fattorino aka Fra' Bartolomeo (1472/1517)

“Venus and Putti” and “Zeus sends Mercury to Apollo” by Francesco Albani (1578/1660)

“A rich mythological conception of learned inventions, never sterile, however, because activated with very sharp transitions of truth, with an ease and a spirit intimately 'Bolognese'. (...) There is in Albani’s works a sense of novelty and poetic sense (...) for his personal humanistic transformation of the concept of classics, impossible to be recreated exactly, but interpreted by Albani with a life of its own, if dropped in a erotic and bourgeois environment” (Antonio Boschetto - Dizionario Enciclopedico degli Italiani Treccani)

“Queen Artemisia Drinking the Ashes of her Husband” and “Lucretia” by the artist from Bologna Gian Gioseffo del Sole (1654/1719)

“Vanity” by Angelo Caroselli (1585/1652)

“St. John the Baptist” by an unknown artist from Naples

“Madonna and Child” and “St. Agnes” by the Florentine Carlo Dolci (1616/86)

“The image was supposed therefore to move emotionally the observer and, in order to achieve this, paintings had to be painted by those who had faith and subjects had to be represented in an illusive way. Dolci expressed in his paintings his personal religiosity but also the religious ideals of the time (...). Dolci assumed this position with precise religious conscience. He gradually honed and extolled his means of expression, relinquishing any dispersion and focusing more and more the image, often reduced to a half figure even without movement. With this painter of great stylistic coherence the expressive evolution happened thus in the sense of increasingly limiting self-imposed constraints to reach with the extreme concentration of an illusively striking image a more compelling call to prayer” (Maria Barbara Guerrieri Borsoi - Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani)

“Battle” by Jacques Courtois aka Borgognone (1628/79)

“Madonna and Child” by Andrea Del Sarto (1486/1530)

“Rest on the Flight into Egypt” sixteenth century by an unknown artist from Parma

“Madonna and Child” by the Orazio Lomi aka Orazio Gentileschi (1563/1639) from Pisa

“In the works of Gentileschi it is possible to see a free and original interpretation of the poetry and coloring of Caravaggio. The Tuscan quality, the simple compositional structures and his clear draughtsmanship and craftsmanship always characterized his production. His profound sense of color led Caravaggio's luminosity to optical effects clearest and lightest such as to enhance in particular the silky brocade and the softness of soft clothes” (Carlo Bertelli, Giuliano Briganti, Antonio Giuliano)

“Madonna of the Straw” about 1625 by the great Flemish Antoon Van Dyck (1599/1641). It was painted during the period in which he lived in Italy

“The painting alludes to Christ's death in the veil of sadness that appears on the face of the Madonna and in the symbols that surround the characters” (Official Website of the Galleria Corsini - galleriacorsini.beniculturali.it)

“Portrait of Philip II of Spain” by an artist of the school of Titian

“Virgin Mary” and “St. Joseph” by an artist of the school of Federico Fiori aka Barocci

“Norandino and Lucina discovered by the giant” maybe by the Sicilian Antonio Alberti aka Barbalonga (1600/49) a pupil of Domenichino

The subject was taken from the Orlando Furioso by Ludovico Ariosto

“A rare subject known in Rome for a large painting by Giovanni Lanfranco in the Galleria Borghese which should probably be considered as a precedent for this painting. (...) Are evident, compared with a good graphics capability, the limits of the coloristic research especially in the figures in the foreground made almost monochrome with a few shots of pink to raise the incarnate, probably in an attempt to submit to Domenichino's poetic of 'suffering' with Norandino and Lucina white as marble with fear” (Sivigliano Alloisi)

“Birth of the Virgin Mary” by Antonio Carracci (about 1589/1618), son of Annibale Carracci

“Moses saved from the waters” by the Belgian Louis Cousin aka Luigi Gentile (1605/67)

“Ecstasy of St. Mary Magdalene” and “Death of Adonis” by Marco Antonio Franceschini (1648/1729)

“Madonna and Child” by Francesco Trevisani (1656/1746)

“Vision of St. Jerome” and “Charity” by Cesare Gennari (1637/88) from the Emilia region

“Landscape with Animals” by the Dutch Nicholas Berchern (1620/83)          

“Andromeda” by the Florentine Francesco Furini (1603/46) a specialist in painting female pale and smooth bodies

“All the critics have stressed the importance of the stimulus exerted by the pictorial environment of the Venetian lagoon on the development (...) of the style of Furini, without detracting from the influence of other models, starting with Andrea del Sarto and ending with Correggio and Leonardo, whose technique of sfumato impressed Furini very much. He, incidentally, had a copy of the Treatise on Painting by Leonardo, with illustrative drawings done by Furini himself (...). The fourth decade represents the consecration of Furini in Florentine, especially among the noble families” (Roberto Cannatà - Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani Treccani)

“Scene of an inn” by the Flemish David Teniers the Younger (1610/90)

“Country Fair” by Maarten Van Cleve (about 1527/81)

“Farmers and horses” by the Flemish Crispin Van Den Broek (1523/91)

“May Day” by Jacopo Vignali (1592/1664)

“Madonna and Child” by Francesco Solimena (1657/1747)

“Martyrdom of St. Bartholomew” by Mattia Preti (1613/99)

“The vital element of his style is to propose, with clear pictorial view, the fundamental problem chiaroscuro, which, in the footsteps of Caravaggio, by G.B. Caracciolo (the Battistello), on the one hand, and the best Guercino and Lanfranco, from 'another, always represented the reason for his art. Its luminosity is realized (even through complex intentions of composition) more and more decidedly in the paintings collected, where the constraint of space seems to intensify in the imagination of the artist, at the same time, the value chiaroscuro and dramatic feeling” (Enciclopedia Treccani)

“Martyrdom of St. Stephen” by Ludovico Carracci (1555/1619)

“Virgin Mary and Child with St. Catherine of Siena” by Filippo Lauri (1623/94)

“Portrait of an elderly lady believed to be Martin Luther's wife” and “Portrait of a man believed to be Martin Luther” by a pupil of Jan Van Scorel (1495/1562)

“Christ Carrying the Cross” by Benvenuto Tisi aka Garofalo (about 1481/1559)

“Christ Carrying the Cross” by Giorgio Vasari (1511/74)