The «Girolamo e Rosaria Devanna» National Gallery of Apulia is a picture gallery housed in palazzo Sylos-Calò in Bitonto, a Renaissance building of the first half of the sixteenth century. It holds works mostly from southern Italy, but also from the rest of Italy and from abroad.
What to see
The collections come from the donation of the collector siblings Girolamo and Rosaria Devanna, who made available most of a very rich private collection of 229 paintings and 108 drawings by important Italian and foreign artists, dating from the sixteenth century to the early twentieth, put together over more than forty years of research. The first ideas of a museum go back to 2004 and were taken up again in 2005, after an exhibition at Palazzo Venezia in Rome; the gallery was inaugurated on 18 April 2009. The paintings on show are divided into six sections, the richest being the one on Italian art, with Neapolitan and Apulian painting of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, works from the Roman Baroque milieu and others from Liguria, Emilia, the Veneto and the Marche.
Among the works are a rare panel fragment, the Head of a Saint, which the critic Federico Zeri attributed to the fourteenth-century Giovanni da Rimini; for the Renaissance a Nativity by Pietro Negroni, the Portrait of a Gentleman by Titian and the Magdalene by Paolo Veronese, together with a group of icons by Cretan painters. The seventeenth century is one of the largest sections, with names such as Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi, Salvator Rosa, Luca Giordano, Francesco Solimena, besides the Christ Mocked by Bernardino Mei; among the Spanish, autograph works are the Portrait of a Man with Moustache and Goatee by Diego Velázquez and the Portrait of a Dominican by El Greco. The eighteenth century is represented by the great Neapolitan school, with De Matteis, De Mura, Giaquinto, Diano and Conca, and by European artists such as Meléndez, Lorenzo Tiepolo, Füssli and Hamilton; the nineteenth by Delacroix, Gros, Winterhalter and von Lenbach, alongside the Italians Speranza, De Nittis, Toma, Netti and Morelli.
Visiting
The gallery is housed in palazzo Sylos-Calò, in Bitonto. The sources consulted give no opening hours or fees: check them.
Our editors' tip
Among the museum's emblems, besides Giovanni Lanfranco's Christ Taking Leave of His Mother, are two works by Nicolas Poussin: a Nymph and Satyr Drinking, of uncertain attribution and assigned by critics to the painter's workshop, and the sketch for the Martyrdom of Saint Erasmus, the masterpiece the artist left in the Vatican.
