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A superb group of still-lifes tracks the genre’s development in the 17th and 18th centuries with masterpieces by Giuseppe Recco and Giovanni Battista Ruoppolo of Naples, Felice Boselli of Piacenza, Arcangelo Resani, active in Bologna, and Carlo Magini of Fano. The great Neoclassical age in Faenza is represented by the work of Michele Sangiorgi and Felice Giani, who frescoed the city’s leading aristorcratic palazzi, and the Romantic era by artists from the Scuola del Disegno such as Tommaso Minardi and Gaspare Mattioli, and by the historical paintings of Achille Farina and Ludovico Bellenghi.

Antonio Berti, whose Portrait of the Castellani Family is on display, taught at the Scuola d’Arte e Mestieri, his pupils including the brilliant Domenico Baccarini – who died still very young in 1907 – and a group of artists who formed the so-called “Cenacolo Baccariniano”. The Italian and international context in which they moved is represented here by Libero Andreotti’s Mrs. Dudovich and by Auguste Rodin’s bronzes shown in the Exhibition of 1908 devoted to Faenza-born physicist and mathematician Evangelista Torricelli, a pupil of Galileo.