GALLERIE NAZIONALI DI ARTE ANTICA - Palazzo Barberini | Carlo Maratti e il ritratto | 6 dicembre 2024 - 16 febbraio 2025

Portraits of Popes and Princes of the Roman Baroque

The National Galleries of Ancient Art

present

CARLO MARATTI AND THE PORTRAIT.

Popes and Princes of the Roman Baroque

curated by Simonetta Prosperi Valenti Rodinò and Yuri Primarosa

Four hundred years after the birth of the great master of the Italian seventeenth century,

Palazzo Barberini presents an unprecedented exhibition dedicated to the portraitist activity

of the Marche painter, a refined narrator of the protagonists of the Roman court

December 6, 2024 – February 16, 2025

National Galleries of Ancient Art - Palazzo Barberini

Via delle Quattro Fontane 13, Rome

Rome, October 23, 2024. Four hundred years after the birth of Carlo Maratti (Camerano 1625 – Rome 1713) and on the occasion of the publication of the catalog raisonné of his works, the National Galleries of Ancient Art present CARLO MARATTI AND THE PORTRAIT. POPES AND PRINCES OF THE ROMAN BAROQUE, a focused exhibition curated by Simonetta Prosperi Valenti Rodinò and Yuri Primarosa, which from December 6, 2024, to February 16, 2025, brings to the halls of Palazzo Barberini the portrait production of the Marche master, a central figure in Roman and Italian painting of the second half of the seventeenth century.

Although the painter's fortune is mainly linked to paintings with sacred subjects and numerous decorations made for the churches of Rome, Maratti was a European-renowned portraitist who, through these works, managed to establish the primacy of his workshop and his role as an arbiter of artistic taste on the Roman scene for over half a century.

For realistic effectiveness, meticulous execution, balance and expressiveness, careful interaction between introspection and display of public role, and naturally for pictorial quality, the works on display—some of which have been restored for the occasion—stand up to comparison with those of the best specialists of the era.

Maratti's European fame as a portraitist was based not only on his ability to combine the definition of facial features with a penetrating investigation of character but also on delivering the character to posterity, representing them among objects rendered with great skill, and specifically chosen to reveal their rank, profession, taste, aspirations, and most hidden interests.

In the room dedicated to the exhibition, among Maratti's masterpiece portraits, stand out the paintings executed for Clement IX Rospigliosi and various members of the Barberini family, some displayed for the first time. The Portrait of Maria Maddalena Rospigliosi Panciatichi (1664) with the finest gown of her trousseau, the powerful official portrait of Prince Maffeo Barberini (circa 1670-1671), the Portrait of Cardinal Giacomo Rospigliosi (1680), and naturally, the portrait of Pope Clement IX Rospigliosi (1669), for which the painter had the honor of remaining seated while painting, so that his inspiration would not be in any way disrupted by fatigue.

The effigy of the Pope, coming from the Vatican Pinacoteca, is here juxtaposed with the admirable portrait by Giovan Battista Gaulli of the same pontiff, to seal the meeting of two apparently irreconcilable categories of seventeenth-century art: classicism (Maratti) and baroque (Gaulli).

Maratti knew how to articulate with renewed momentum a proven formula in Roman portraiture that had reached its peak in painting with Pietro da Cortona and Andrea Sacchi by the mid-seventeenth century. The Marche master, the best pupil of the latter, created an ideal and stratified gallery of faces: he immortalized not only popes, prelates, and aristocrats but also Roman "belles," the first "milords" of the Grand Tour, professionals, relatives, and friends.

Among the latter was Giovan Pietro Bellori (1613-1696), the painter's admirer, devoted protector, and intellectual alter ego. His portrait was made by Maratti to celebrate the release of his collection of biographies, written on the model of Vasari's Lives, in which he established the preeminence of classicism over naturalism and a new idea of Beauty, shared with the painter friend, founded on the cult of classical antiquity.
Web: www.barberinicorsini.org