Carracci’s lavish frescoes from dismantled Roman chapel are reunited of their residence metropolis after 200 years in exile

Within the early seventeenth century, the Italian artist Annibale Carracci (1560-1609) was commissioned by the rich Spanish banker, Juan Enríquez de Herrera, to brighten his household chapel in Rome. The artist fell gravely sick shortly after and entrusted his assistants, below the supervision of Francesco Albani, with finishing the venture. The outcome was a lavish cycle of frescoes to match the gorgeous masterpieces Carracci had created for the Palazzo Farnese in Rome only a few years earlier.

Till not too long ago, fashionable viewers have been pressured to think about what the assemblage—which is devoted to Saint Didacus of Alcalá and depicts biblical topics in addition to on a regular basis scenes—appeared like in its entirety. The Herrera Chapel within the Church of San Giacomo degli Spagnoli was dismantled 200 years in the past, and Carracci’s works had been eliminated from the partitions and shipped off to Spain to be saved within the deposits of two totally different museums.

Now, the frescoes have been reunited for what its organisers have referred to as a “momentous” trio of exhibitions. Following shows on the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid and the Museu Nacional d’Artwork de Catalunya (MNAC) in Barcelona earlier this 12 months, the works are being proven at Rome’s Palazzo Barberini this month. The exhibition marks their grand return to town during which they had been conceived.

“We had been contemplating bringing collectively the frescoes for this exhibition for over 20 years,” says the Prado’s Andrés Úbeda, who has curated the exhibition. “That is the nice unknown work in Carracci’s oeuvre. Seeing it intact means it may well now be studied, researched and reassessed.”

The frescoes and Saint Didacus of Alcalá Presenting Juan de Herrera’s Son to Christ (round 1606), a powerful altarpiece Carracci created for a similar church, remained of their authentic setting till 1830. That 12 months, the chapel was destroyed and the works moved to the church of Santa Maria in Monserrato degli Spagnoli. The Didacus altarpiece remained on the church, whereas seven of the frescoes had been moved to the Prado and 9 to MNAC. An additional three fragments are lacking.

The frescoes saved on the Prado needed to be restored earlier than all of the works could possibly be reunited. (These in Barcelona and Rome had been restored some years earlier.) The Prado procrastinated for years as a result of it lacked the sources and experience, Úbeda says. In 2012 it lastly appointed an exterior knowledgeable for the three 12 months restoration venture.

Whereas organising the present with three artwork establishments in two totally different nations was “terribly troublesome”, the rewards have been nice, in accordance with Úbeda. Every of the venues has displayed the 16 frescoes in a different way, permitting guests to view them from quite a lot of views. In Madrid, the works had been proven sequentially alongside the partitions, which means museum-goers may rise up shut. They had been organized extra abstractly in Barcelona, on a steel grid that seemed they had been floating in mid-air.

Blended situation

The Palazzo Barberini has opted to distribute the works within the huge Sala dei Marmi—an area with 16m-tall partitions—in efforts to evoke the size and format of the Herrera Chapel. “We’re aiming to re-create the unique relationship between the viewers and the works,” says Flaminia Gennari Santori, the director of the Galleria Nazionale di Arte Antica, which includes each the Palazzo Barberini and the Palazzo Corsini. “This is among the few museums the place it’s doable to placed on an exhibition like this.”

Even after the restoration, the frescoes are in a “blended situation”, Úbeda says. One depicting San Diego saving a toddler who has fallen asleep in an oven, for instance, was broken when the curved fragment was faraway from the wall and flattened out. Even so, the exhibition has proved unsuitable students who had written off the works, Úbeda says. “They don’t seem to be in the most effective form, however they’re removed from destroyed.”

In accordance with Gennari Santori, the present additionally sheds mild on the workings of Carracci and his assistants—“the best workshop in Rome”—and particularly Albani’s central position inside it. As soon as Carracci had withdrawn from the venture, his assistants achieved a “extremely unitary model”: a sworn statement to their autonomy, ability and mastery. “After his unimaginable frescoes on the Palazzo Farnese, Carracci’s assistants managed to quickly produce one thing equally grandiose,” Gennari Santori says. “That’s no small feat.”

• Carracci: the Herrera Chapel, Palazzo Barberini, Rome, 17 November-5 February 2023