Galleria Spada

The gallery was founded in 1927, after the Italian State bought the Spada collection and the palace in November 1926 for 14 million lire. It closed during the war. Federico Zeri became director in 1948, recovered the dispersed pictures and reopened the gallery in 1951, arranging four rooms as a seventeenth-century quadreria with the frames touching and the small pictures hung above the large. Room III was designed in 1636–37 by Paolo Maruscelli for Bernardino Spada. The collection holds work by Guido Reni, Guercino, Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi, Titian, Parmigianino, Jan Brueghel the Elder, Salvator Rosa, Domenichino, Annibale Carracci, Pietro Testa, Niccolò Tornioli, Michelangelo Cerquozzi, Mattia Preti, Giovanni Lanfranco, Pieter van Laer and Francesco Solimena, a Bernini bust of the Laocoön, and Blaeu celestial and terrestrial globes of the early eighteenth century.