Audio tour The Art Gallery

The Art Gallery

The art gallery, located on the first floor, includes works relating to a very broad chronological period, ranging from the late Middle Ages to the 20th century. Among the paintings from the late medieval period, noteworthy are the Madonna enthroned with Child crowning Saint Catherine among angels and saints, the splendid polyptych, formerly in the church home of the Confraternity of Sant'Antonio Abbate, referred to an anonymous Sicilian master called Maestro del Polyptych of Trapani, active between the end of the fourteenth century and the beginning of the fifteenth century and the intense Pietà by the Neapolitan Roberto di Oderisio, a follower of Giotto, in which the suggestions of Giotto's painting coexist with the elegant linearism inherited from Sienese painting. Numerous canvases referable to the great masters of the Neapolitan and southern seventeenth century from the Rape of Europe by Bernardo Cavallino to the sensual Maddalena by Andrea Vaccaro. St. Francis receiving the stigmata is attributed to the brush of the great Venetian master Tiziano Vecellio, once in the church of St. Francis of Assisi in Trapani, in which the drama of the sacred event seems to be reflected in the intense shades of the sky, pierced by luminous flashes of dawn. In the large room dedicated to the painting of "Still Life" there are numerous canvases, exemplifying that pictorial genre that was widely spread in Italy and Flanders in the 17th century: from the Still Life with Fruit by the Neapolitan Giuseppe Ruoppolo, to the scenographic Allegory of the Earth by the Flemish painter Abraham Brueghel. Instead, the paintings of the Trapani artists Vito Carrera, Andrea Carreca and Domenico La Bruna are an expression of local culture from late Mannerism to late Baroque. The painting of the early twentieth century is finally represented by the Portrait of Nunzio Nasi, the work of the Turin-born Giacomo Balla, who, using the techniques of pointillist painting, immortalised, as if in a photographic snapshot, the well-known Trapani politician, who was at the time Minister of Public Instruction.