Pinacoteca Nazionale

About

The Pinacotecta Nazionale (transl. national picture gallery) is an art gallery in Ferrara, Emilia-Romagna, Italy. It is located on the piano nobile (or first floor) of the Palazzo dei Diamanti, a work of Renaissance architecture by Biagio Rossetti, commissioned by Leonello d’Este in 1447. Not to be confused with the Civic Museum on the lower floor, which has hosted temporary exhibitions of contemporary art since 1992, the Pinacoteca houses a collection of paintings by the Ferrarese School dating from the thirteenth to the eighteenth centuries. It was founded in 1836 by the Municipality of Ferrara after Napoleon's widespread dissolution of churches threatened the protection of important public artworks. The gallery is formed as much around notable northern Italian painters as it is around the exquisite interior decoration of the palace itself, together with remnants of frescoes from local churches and later acquisitions from the Sacrati Strozzi collection. Since 2015 the Pinacoteca Nazionale has formed a part of the Gallerie Estensi, a network of museums sharing Ferrara's cultural heritage with that of Modena and Sassuolo.

The Pinacoteca tells the history of the House of Este from that family's promotion as dukes of Ferrara in 1296 to its forced relocation to Modena in 1598. The gallery contains an impressive range of Italian works spanning the reigns of the dukes Leonello, Borso, Ercole I, Alfonso I and Alfonso II d'Este. Arranged chronologically, the exhibition begins with a room dedicated to late Gothic sculpture, fresco and panel painting, progressing through to the early Renaissance, the sixteenth century, Mannerism and lastly to the early seventeenth century, before Cesare I lost Ferrara to the Papal States. Highlights of the tour include the Hall of Honour, the sixteenth-century apartments of Virginia de' Medici (the roundels for these, early products of the Carracci workshop, can be seen in Modena's Galleria Estense ) and a room dedicated to the step-by-step process of creating a fresco, panel or oil painting, complementing Cennino Cennini ’s Il Libro dell’arte.

- Deposition from the Cross by Bastarolo (Giuseppe Mazzuoli)

- Allegory with Bacchus; The Virgin and Child, St. Lucy and St. Matthew ; Circumcision by Bastianino

- Adoration of the Magi predella by Jacopo and Giovanni Bellini

- Wedding at Cana; Guardian Angel by Carlo Bononi

- Death of the Virgin by Vittore Carpaccio

- The Dream of the Virgin by Simone dei Crocifissi

- Two works from a liberal arts cycle by Dosso Dossi

- Vision of St. John the Evangelist by Battista Dossi

- Madonna and Child by Gentile de Fabriano

- St. John the Baptist by the Master of Figline

- Madonna of the Clouds; Massacre of the Innocents by Il Garofalo

- Adoration of the Shepherds by Gaetano Gandolfi

- Christ on the Cross attributed to Guariento

- The Martyrdom of St. Maurilius by Guercino

- Head of St John the Baptist by Giovanni Francesco Maineri

- Christ with the Animula of the Virgin by Andrea Mantegna

- Nativity with St. Bernard and St. Alberic by Ludovico Mazzolino

- Flight to Egypt; Agony in the Garden; Deposition by Ortolano (Giovan Battista Benvenuti)