Collezioni Comunali d'Arte

Upstairs in the town hall on Piazza Maggiore, Bologna keeps a museum most capitals would envy: medieval painted crosses, Donato Creti's Senate series, Francesco Hayez's Ruth and Artemisia Gentileschi, hung exactly where cardinal legates once lived, in rooms whose ceilings are artworks themselves.

Why it matters

Founded in 1936, the Collezioni Comunali d'Arte occupy what was originally the apartment of the Cardinal Legates — the popes' viceroys in Bologna — inside Palazzo d'Accursio. That origin shapes everything: this is a "furnished museum", where paintings, furniture, porcelain, textiles and lace sit in rooms that kept their decorations rather than moving to white-cube galleries. The collections grow from the great civic donations of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — Baruzzi, Pizzardi, Pepoli, Rusconi — plus works once owned by the city's magistracies. The collections reflect Bologna's civic identity: papal government in painted state rooms, civic pride on the walls and urban wealth in furniture and fabrics.

What to notice

The Sala Urbana, dedicated in 1630 to Pope Urban VIII by Cardinal Legate Bernardino Spada, has nearly two hundred coats of arms of the legates and a ceiling painted by Angelo Michele Colonna. The Galleria Vidoniana, built for Cardinal Pietro Vidoni in 1665, contains more than twenty paintings by Donato Creti, including a series of eighteen canvases and copper panels sent to the city's Senate in 1744. The Cappella Farnese holds Prospero Fontana's 1562 frescoes of the Stories of the Virgin, which the seventeenth-century critic Malvasia called the "Sistina" of the Bolognesi. The collections also include medieval painted and carved crosses by Vitale da Bologna, Jacopo di Paolo, Barnaba da Modena and Alvar Pirez; works by Francesco Francia, Luca Signorelli, Amico Aspertini, Tintoretto, Ludovico Carracci, Artemisia Gentileschi and Antonio Canova; and Hayez's 1835 Ruth. A 2004 section presents Pelagio Palagi as painter and collector, including studies for the lost Torlonia cycle and projects for the Savoy court.

Context and history

The museum's seat explains its character. The legates' winter apartment kept fregi and painted ceilings from the sixteenth century to the early nineteenth, and the 1936 museum simply moved into that decorated shell, adding the Sala Farnese's great fresco cycle of 1660 — papal power narrated on the walls — run by a team directed by Carlo Cignani with Emilio Taruffi, Luigi Scaramuccia, Lorenzo Pasinelli and Giovanni Maria Bibiena among the painters. Donations did the rest: the Creti nucleus destined for the Senate cittadino, a substantial share of Palagi's own collection, and the medieval cross group transferred from the civic museum at Palazzo Galvani. The museum belongs to the Istituzione Bologna Musei network and shares Palazzo d'Accursio with the Torre dell'Orologio.