The second floor of the Palazzo Barberini in Rome houses a collection of eighteenth-century paintings. The Barberini family had already begun selling off their collections in the eighteenth century with the sales by the last heir, Cornelia Costanza, married to Giulio Cesare Colonna di Sciarra.
The inheritance disputes among the children who had to divide the Colonna and Barberini primogenitures led to a division of the collections between the two branches of the family, with an agreement signed in Paris in 1811. Only in 1934 was the definitive dispersion of the collections reached, with the state’s approval, which, through a specific law, allowed the sale of fideicommissary works in exchange for a small private core, abandoning the protection of one of the most important fideicommissary collections in Rome. Only in 1984 was the reorganization better defined by bringing the Corsini collection back to its original historic location and bringing all works from acquisitions or collections without their historic headquarters into Palazzo Barberini.
The intention was to create in this location, when possible, a National Gallery in the true sense of the term, arranged chronologically but with the possibility to include acquisitions and additions in the itinerary, thus differing in concept from the structure defined by historic collections in the Roman scene, instead much closer in approach to major foreign museums and equipped like them with all the most modern services. Overall, the collection is very rich in masterpieces, especially from the 16th and 17th centuries.
The 15th century is not fully represented, though it features the fundamental painting by Filippo Lippi with the Madonna on the throne with Child, dated 1437, on loan from Corneto Tarquinia. More substantial are the 16th-century collections, among which the most famous is Raphael’s Fornarina, along with paintings by Andrea del Sarto, Beccafumi, Sodoma, Bronzino, works by Lotto, Tintoretto, Titian, and El Greco, reaching Bolognese works and ending the century with the splendid Judith Beheading Holofernes by Caravaggio, and the great 17th century with works by Reni, Domenichino, Guercino, Lanfranco, Bernini, Poussin, Pietro da Cortona, Gaulli, and Maratta. The 18th-century painting is also very well represented. It is organized into groups by school, giving a complete and very homogeneous overview of the Italian painting of the period, with the addition of a rare group of French eighteenth-century paintings.
