The second floor of the Palazzo Barberini in Rome houses a collection of eighteenth-century paintings. The Barberini had already begun to dispose of their collections in the eighteenth century with the sales by the last descendant, Cornelia Costanza, married to Giulio Cesare Colonna di Sciarra.
The inheritance disputes of 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 stipulated in Paris in 1811. Only in 1934 was the definitive dispersion of the collections reached, with the approval of the State, which, with a specific law, allowed the sale of fideicommissary works in exchange for a small core in ownership, renouncing the protection of one of the most important fideicommissary collections in Rome. Only in 1984 was a better definition of the arrangement reached, bringing the Corsini collection back to its original historic site and bringing all works from purchases or collections without their historic site to the Palazzo Barberini.
The intention was to create in this location, when possible, a National Gallery in the true sense of the term, organized chronologically but with the possibility of including purchases and integrations in the path, thus differing in conception from the structure defined by the historical collections of the Roman scene, conversely much closer to large foreign museums and equipped like them with all the most modern services. Overall, the collection is very rich in masterpieces, especially from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
The fifteenth century is not fully represented, but stands out with the fundamental painting by Filippo Lippi with the Madonna enthroned with Child, dated 1437, on deposit from Corneto Tarquinia. More substantial are the sixteenth-century collections, among which Raphael’s Fornarina stands out for notoriety, along with paintings by Andrea del Sarto, Beccafumi, Sodoma, Bronzino, works by Lotto, Tintoretto, Titian and El Greco, up to Bolognese works, ending the century with Caravaggio’s splendid Judith Beheading Holofernes and the great seventeenth century with works by Reni, Domenichino, Guercino, Lanfranco, Bernini, Poussin, Pietro da Cortona, Gaulli, Maratta. Eighteenth-century painting is also very well represented. It is organized into groups by schools that provide a complete and very homogeneous panorama in quality of Italian painting of the period, with the addition of a rare group of eighteenth-century French paintings.
