Di natura e d’invenzione. Paesaggi, vedute e capricci dai depositi delle Gallerie Nazionali di Arte Antica

The National Galleries of Ancient Art in Palazzo Barberini present an exhibition focused on landscape through a selection of masterpieces usually not visible to the public.

The paintings on display in the Sala dei Paesaggi (Landscape Hall), once a private dining room on the main floor of the majestic building, come from the storerooms and the Quadreria, the Museum Laboratory that houses the works of art reserved for research and educational projects.

Curated by Luigi Gallo with Paola Nicita and Yuri Primarosa, Di natura e d'invenzione. Paesaggi, Vedute e Capricci dai depositi delle Gallerie Nazionali di Arte Antica creates a dreamlike and pre-Romantic tale of Rome and its countryside in fourteen paintings by great masters of art, which, depicting various landscapes, testify to the birth of new relationship between man and nature and a new impulse in the genre-painting between the 17th and 18th centuries and, thanks to the sodality between artists and scientists, a new way of interpreting the landscape.

On display are the enchanting works of Nicolas Poussin, Gaspard Dughet, known as the Master of the Birch Tree, the myth and the sacred of the Flemish Jan Frans van Bloemen, known as the Horizon, and the representation of a real place by Pietro da Cortona, the analytical Enlightenment landscape painting of Jacob Philipp Hackert and the imaginary union of architectural follies and idyllic backdrops by Andrea Locatelli, Giovanni Paolo Pannini, François Boucher, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, and Hubert Robert, offering a marvellous vision of endless spring.

Photo: Jan Frans Van Bloemen known as Orizzonte (the Horizon- Antwerp, 1662 - Rome, 1749) and Placido Costanzi (Rome, 1702-1759), Landscape with figures (The Morning), 1720-1730, oil on canvas, 100 x 137 cm, Courtesy of Gallerie Nazionali di Arte Antica, Roma (MiC) - Bibliotheca Hertziana, Istituto Max Planck per la storia dell'arte/Enrico Fontolan