Palazzo Provenzali, also called Casa Provenzali, is a building of the late sixteenth century that stands in Cento on Via Provenzali, at right angles to Corso del Guercino. In the second decade of the seventeenth century it belonged to the nobleman Alberto Provenzali, brother of the painter and mosaicist Marcello Provenzale: in all probability it was he who entrusted the young Guercino with the decoration of a room in the house. After the Provenzali the palace passed to several families; today it belongs to the Benazzi and is still a private home.
What to see
The façade, orderly and symmetrical, has at its centre a window with a carved eighteenth-century balustrade, and below it the entrance passage. An eighteenth-century staircase leads to the first floor, where the room decorated by Guercino with his pupils is found. Around the ceiling runs a frieze with eleven scenes of the deeds of Provenco, the soldier of Caesar whom family tradition regarded as the founder of the Provenzali: they are accompanied by scrolls with Latin mottoes and set in painted architecture, among monochrome telamons, figures in niches and putti at the corners.
Above the frieze stretches a wooden ceiling painted with the forty-eight Ptolemaic constellations, among acanthus scrolls, putti, masks and festoons. For this decoration critics have proposed an earlier date, towards the end of the sixteenth century; the scholar Sandro Zannarini has pointed to its probable source in the woodcuts of the «Poeticon Astronomicon» of Hyginus printed in Venice by Erhard Ratdolt.
Visiting
The palace is a private house, and any possibility of seeing the room should be checked before going. Frieze and ceiling became visible again with the restoration that followed the earthquake of 2012: from the second half of the nineteenth century a false ceiling of reed matting had hidden them.
Our editors' tip
The frieze was tracked down in May 1936 by Denis Mahon, who was twenty-six and would become the foremost specialist on Guercino. He had come to Cento with a guidebook of 1768 that recorded a fresco by the painter in the house; seeing no decoration in the room, he imagined a false ceiling, lowered himself on a rope from a hatch in the roof down to a main beam and found the paintings by the light of an electric torch.
