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Cleopatra and the cardinal return home to Palazzo Barberini

2022-05-24T12:41:56.464Z


The museum celebrates two new acquisitions. Osanna "is Italian pride" (ANSA)


ROME - Singer and harp virtuoso, talented composer and appreciated theatrical author, so much so that on his death there will be a great fight over the fate of his considerable heritage, Marco Marazzoli was still a simple musician welcomed into the entourage of the powerful Cardinal Antonio Barberini, nephew of Pope Urban VIII, when he gave harp lessons to the young daughter of Giovanni Lanfranco, a painter who like him came from Parma.

A fellow countryman, in short, to whom the musician in exchange for those lessons commissioned three farsighted paintings: a Venus playing the harp, where between the


    Three paintings that Lanfranco all made with the same model and that in 1662, when he died, Marazzoli left to the Barberinis, the one who had somehow been his family for many years.

Today, at least in part, that nucleus of works is reassembled: acquired for 195 thousand euros by the State, Cleopatra returns to the halls of Palazzo Barberini, who finds her place on the main floor right next to Venus playing the harp, already in the collection of the Roman museum.

And together with the paintings that the musician wanted to donate to the Barberinis, a Portrait of Cardinal Antonio Barberini returns home to the Palace, a particularly happy work by the Pesaro painter Simone Cantarini (Pesaro 1612 - Verona 1648) which the cardinal had probably made to Pesaro where he spent a few months, in 1631, as a young papal legate.

The state


    "A cultural operation of fundamental importance", happily comments the director of the National Galleries of Ancient Art Flaminia Gennari Sartori, underlining how the Barberinis were among the main European patrons of the seventeenth century: "their collection of works of art can be considered the manifesto of their cultural project ", points out the scholar.


    Alongside her, the general director of state museums Massimo Osanna reiterates the importance of the two acquisitions: "a reason for celebration and pride", he says, "for all Italian museums, which once again prove to be places of cultural reference , with an active and dynamic role for the knowledge of the cultural heritage and for the promotion of its use ".


    Bought by the state at Brun Fine Art in Milan, La morte di Cleopatra (oil on canvas, cm.100x143) was declared of particular cultural interest and therefore not exportable, in 1999. He had already returned to the rooms of Palazzo Barberini two years ago for an exhibition.


    The portrait of Cardinal Antonio Barberini by Cantarini, an oil on paper applied on canvas (48X 36 cm), is instead a preparatory study for the portrait of the young nephew of Urban VIII, later made by the same painter on canvas in two versions, one of the which is kept in the Corsini Gallery.


    It comes from the collection of the Gennaro Santilli Foundation and also in this case it is a work that cannot be exported abroad.

Now, however, he is home again, next to the painted and sculpted portraits of Urban VIII and his nephews in the great room dedicated to the Barberini.

And it's right that he stays there.

(HANDLE).


Source: ansa

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