Il National Museum of the Palazzo di Venezia in Rome is housed in what was the grand papal residence of the Venetian Paolo II Barbo (1464 – 1471), a great enthusiast of collecting and the ideal initiator of the museum and artistic destiny of the building. Established in 1921, the Museum centers its interest around the so-called “applied arts.”
Its collections were formed from an initial core of sculptures and works coming from Castel Sant’Angelo, the National Gallery of Ancient Art, and the collections of the nearby Collegio Romano museum founded in the seventeenth century by the encyclopedic Jesuit Athanasius Kircher.
The artistic material of the original collection consisted mainly of works from the medieval and Renaissance periods, testimony to particular sectors of decorative art such as small bronzes, enamels, marbles, and ceramics of Italian manufacture.
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