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Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica

Art museums and galleries in RomeEuropean art museum and gallery stubsGalleria Nazionale d'Arte AnticaItalian art stubsItalian museum stubs
Italian palace stubsNational galleriesNational museums of Italy
Le Palais Barberini (Rome) (5970353582)
Le Palais Barberini (Rome) (5970353582)

The Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica or National Gallery of Ancient Art is an art museum in Rome, Italy. It is the principal national collection of older paintings in Rome – mostly from before 1800; it does not hold any antiquities. It has two sites: the Palazzo Barberini and the Palazzo Corsini.The Palazzo Barberini was designed for Pope Urban VIII, a member of the Barberini family, by the sixteenth-century architect Carlo Maderno on the old location of Villa Sforza. Its central salon ceiling was decorated by Pietro da Cortona with the visual panegyric of the Allegory of Divine Providence and Barberini Power.The Palazzo Corsini, formerly known as Palazzo Riario, is a fifteenth-century palace, rebuilt in the eighteenth century by the architect Ferdinando Fuga for Cardinal Neri Maria Corsini.

Excerpt from the Wikipedia article Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica (License: CC BY-SA 3.0, Authors, Images).

Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica
Via Barberini, Rome Municipio Roma I

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N 41.903513888889 ° E 12.490208333333 °
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Palazzo Barberini

Via Barberini
00187 Rome, Municipio Roma I
Lazio, Italy
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Website
barberinicorsini.org

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Le Palais Barberini (Rome) (5970353582)
Le Palais Barberini (Rome) (5970353582)
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Narcissus (Caravaggio)
Narcissus (Caravaggio)

Narcissus is a painting by the Italian Baroque master Caravaggio, painted circa 1597–1599. It is housed in the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica in Rome. The painting was originally attributed to Caravaggio by Roberto Longhi in 1916. This is one of only two known Caravaggios on a theme from Classical mythology, although this is due more to the accidents of survival than the artist's oeuvre. Narcissus, according to the poet Ovid in his Metamorphoses, is a handsome youth who falls in love with his own reflection. Unable to tear himself away, he dies of his passion, and even as he crosses the Styx continues to gaze at his reflection (Metamorphoses 3:339–510).The story of Narcissus was often referenced or retold in literature, for example, by Dante (Paradiso 3.18–19) and Petrarch (Canzoniere 45–46). The story was well known in the circles of such collectors in which Caravaggio was moving in this period, such as those of Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte and the banker Vincenzo Giustiniani. Caravaggio's friend, the poet Giambattista Marino, wrote a description of Narcissus.The story of Narcissus was particularly appealing to artists according to the Renaissance theorist Leon Battista Alberti: "the inventor of painting ... was Narcissus ... What is painting but the act of embracing by means of art the surface of the pool?"Caravaggio painted an adolescent page wearing an elegant brocade doublet, leaning with both hands over the water, as he gazes at this own distorted reflection. The painting conveys an air of brooding melancholy: the figure of Narcissus is locked in a circle with his reflection, surrounded by darkness, so that the only reality is inside this self-regarding loop. The 16th century literary critic Tommaso Stigliani explained the contemporary thinking that the myth of Narcissus "clearly demonstrates the unhappy end of those who love their things too much."