Corsini gallery ( Galleria Corsini )

It is the only example of an eighteenth-century Roman picture gallery which to this day has survived completely intact.

The  Corsini Gallery is housed in the building of the same name at the Lungara just outside Porta Settimiana.

It is an impressive building with a basic design carried out by Ferdinando Fuga between 1732 and 1736 upon the wishes of Cardinal Neri Maria Corsini.

The Florentine cardinal was the nephew of Pope Clement XII, and he acquired the old Riario building situated on the slopes of the Janiculum, which in the seventeenth century was the home of Queen Christina of Sweden and the seat of the Arcadian Academy which she founded, in order to transform it into a splendid noble family residence as well as the monumental centre of the cardinal's collection.

Infact, ancient pieces and modern sculptures of classicistic taste which were scattered around the building welcomed visitors, starting from the vast entrance hall introduced by the triple outward fornix guiding them along the monumental flight of steps with two ramps reaching the apartment on the piano nobile, where a very remarkable picture gallery with works that ranged from the Middle Ages to the modern age was located.

The cardinal was assisted in the collection work by the learned Giovanni Gaetano Bottari, who was a fervent admirer of Maratta and a keen supporter of the classicistic taste, the cardinal himself had a preference above all for seventeenth-century paintings represented by artists of the calibre of Rubens, Van Dyck, Murillo, Caravaggio, Gentileschi, Guercino, Reni, Rosa, Preti and Giordano without disregarding the coeval approaches to scenes of genre, landscape and still life, thereby shaping the Gallery in fact as the centre designated to trace the development of paintings from the XVII and XVIII centuries in Rome and Naples; there is also a sizeable core of foreign works (especially Dutch) that is evidence of the close contact maintained by Cardinal Corsini with the transalpine artists working in the papal city.

The collection was donated to the young Italian State in 1883, along with its architectonic building and part of the original furnishings.

The collection was the origin for the creation of the GaIleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica for which it formed the first nucleus; recently it was the object of a new arrangement that, though having a preference for unification of the paintings by school and theme, intended to reproduce the traditional expository criteria marked by the decorative placement of the items.

A small but valuable collection of small bronzes mostly dated between the end of XVII century and the early decades of XVIII century is displayed on the consoles of various rooms starting from the great entrance hall to the cardinal's apartment called sala del trono and once