Regional Gallery of Sicily "Palazzo Abatellis"
Via Alloro. At the Palazzo Abatelliss. In the splendid rooms of the gallery, works from acquisitions, donations and confiscation of the assets of suppressed religious bodies (1866) have found place. Before this location, the works were part of the Pinacoteca della Regia Università and, from 1866 onwards, of the collections of the National Museum of Palermo, which became a Regional Museum following the transfer of powers on cultural heritage from the State to the Sicilian Region, by virtue of the statute . On the ground floor there are, among the many artifacts, all of the highest quality: the wooden carving works of the twelfth century and the sculptures of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries including some by Antonello Gagini such as the Annunciation and Portrait of Giovinetto and Domenico Gagini such as the Madonna del latte, the majolica painted with metallic luster from the XNUMXth and XNUMXth centuries, the bust of a noblewoman by Francesco Laurana (XNUMXth century) known as Eleonora d'Aragona, with elegant shapes and plastic firmness and painted ceiling panels wooden. In room II, there is the extraordinary large fresco of the Triumph of Death (datable in all probability to the years 1445 and following), coming from Palazzo Sclafani and exhibited in the ex-chapel with lighting from above of great visual impact. Death, on a skeletal horse, breaks into a garden and sows havoc with lethal arrows among the young pleasure-seekers and noble damsels, after having sown the earthly hierarchies, secular and religious, popes and emperors, whose bodies now lie lifeless, saving almost as a mockery the group of miserable and derelict who also invoke her. On the first floor the most important work is undoubtedly the Annunziata by Antonello da Messina (XNUMXth century). A work of formal absoluteness, considered an authentic "icon" of the Italian Renaissance, it is located in room X known as the Antonello room. The Virgin is caught in the supreme instant of the Annunciation (the angel stands in front of her but is invisible). The gesture of the hand, the trapezoid of the mantle, the politeness of the forms and the magnetic gaze, enhance the figure, restoring it an abstract beauty. In the same room, next to it, there are other works by Antonello: the tables with the images of three Doctors of the Church which formed the cusps of a lost polyptych. Before coming across the one dedicated to Antonello, inside the rooms of the noble floor of the Regional Gallery you can admire the "Last Supper" by the Catalan painter Jaume Serra, the "Hall of the crosses", where the cross painted by Pietro Ruzzolone is placed and that of the Master of Galatina and the collection of the art gallery of origin for the most part from churches and convents of the city, with works such as the "Madonna dell'Umiltà" by Bartolomeo Camulio (room VII) the coronation of the Virgin by Riccardo Quartararo (room XI) and the sixteenth-century paintings by Antonello Crescenzio. Room XIII houses a very valuable series of Flemish paintings dating from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the pearl of the collection is certainly the Malvagna triptych by Jan Gossaert. It is a miniaturist work where a Madonna and child with angels, Santa Caterina d'Alessandria and Santa Dorotea are represented, while on the back of the panel there is the coat of arms of the Lanza family. Another masterpiece of the Flemish room is the Deposition by Jan Provost. In the last rooms (XV, XVI and XVII) of this floor there are paintings by Vincenzo da Pavia, Jacopo Palma the elder, the mythological canvases such as "Andromeda liberata da Perseo" by Cavalier d'Arpino and "Venus and Adonis" by Francesco Albani and the most significant works of Mannerism of the Michelangiolesca brand, with paintings by Giorgio Vasari, Girolamo Muziano and Marco Pino. The new museum spaces (green room and red room) unfold on two floors, present a significant collection of late Sicilian mannerism, seventeenth-century painting and realism. The green room illustrates works of the late mannerism of a counter-reformist imprint, through the production of Sicilian artists active at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: Giuseppe Alvino, Gaspare Bazzano and Pietro D'Asaro. Among the other most significant works we should mention "San Francesco" and "The ecstasy of Santa Caterina" by Filippo Paladini. To conclude the exhibition in the green room, a 600th century Palermitan goldsmith's masterpiece, the "Golden Sphere", a large monstrance in gold, gilded silver, enamels and diamonds, coming from the House of the Filipini fathers in Palermo, at Olivella. In the red room the museum itinerary ends, the Caravaggesca component assumes great importance, with the French Simon Vouet author of "Sant'Agata freed from prison", and with "Sleeping Love" by the Neapolitan Battistello Caracciolo but also a good copy of unknown author of Caravaggio's "Supper at Emmaus", National Gallery version of London. The main works in this room are the paintings by Antoon Van Dyck: “Santa Rosalia crowned by angels”, “The Madonna and child” and the “Lamentation” attributed to him. The Flemish painter who, finding himself in Palermo in the terrible days of the plague of 1624, proposed a new iconography and certainly influenced the work of Pietro Novelli in the following decades, of which we mention the very valuable "Moses", "Coronation of San Casimiro", "San Pietro freed from prison "and the splendid altarpiece known as" Communion of St. Mary Magdalene ". Following in the same room, the developments of the figurative culture of the seventeenth century, among the most important works we include: among the foreigners, the canvases of the Flemish Mathias Stomer and the Spanish Josep de Ribera known as the "Spagnoletto", while among the Italians paintings of rare beauty are "La Maddalena" by Andrea Vaccaro, "the torment of Tycius" by Cesare Fracanzano.
Card insertion: Ignatius Caloggero
Photo: Ignazio Caloggero
Information contributions: Ignazio Caloggero, Web
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