Italy To Reinstate Rarely-Seen Art Treasures In Original Sites Around The Country
December 14, 2021 | In the PressFrom Forbes.com (https://www.forbes.com/sites/rebeccahughes/2021/12/14/italy-to-reinstate-rarely-seen-art-treasures-in-original-sites-around-the-country/?sh=3fdd9b3d5d35)
With museum storage spaces bursting with long-hidden artistic treasures, Italy’s Ministry of Culture has announced it will begin returning some to their original locations in a bid to spread the country’s masterpieces throughout the peninsula.
The project will begin by relocating 100 works from some of Italy’s most important museums, including the Uffizi Galleries in Florence, the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan and the Archeological Museum of Naples. Dubbed “100 works return home”, the scheme is an opportunity for paintings and sculptures rarely exhibited to be seen by the public and, in some cases, in the locations for which they were originally conceived. As such, the artworks will be exhibited in lesser-known cultural institutions around the country.
"This project gives new life to works of art by more or less well-known artists that are not currently visible,” said Italy’s Minister of Culture Dario Franceschini, “and promotes smaller, peripheral and less frequented museums.”
From a database of works currently in long-term storage, the first lot were selected either in order to reinstate them in the places they were created for or to integrate with an existing museum collection in order to draw new audiences.
During the weekend, the first artworks found their new home. Two 17th-century landscapes by Neapolitan painter Salvator Rosa were relocated from Rome’s Palazzo Barberini gallery to the National Museum of Matera, a city in southern Italy that has been undergoing a meteoric revival. Yesterday, Federico Barocci's Madonna and Child with Saints John the Baptist and Francis set off from the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan for the Galleria Nazionale delle Marche in Urbino.
