Galleria Regionale della Sicilia "Palazzo Abatellis"

A fifteenth-century Catalan-Gothic palace in the Kalsa quarter holds the regional art gallery of Sicily, where Antonello da Messina's Annunziata, the great Trionfo della Morte fresco and Laurana's bust of Eleonora d'Aragona hang in a museum layout designed by Carlo Scarpa.

Why it matters

This is the pinacoteca of Sicily, the state-level collection that gathers the island's most important paintings and sculpture under one roof. Three works define the gallery's collection: Antonello da Messina's Annunziata of 1473, which the city's tourism portal calls an authentic icon of the Italian Renaissance; the anonymous fifteenth-century Trionfo della Morte, a vast fresco of death on horseback riding down the fashionable; and Francesco Laurana's portrait bust of Queen Eleonora d'Aragona. Just as consequential for design lovers is the building's second life: after wartime bombing, the architect Carlo Scarpa arranged the gallery in the mid-1950s, and his intervention is studied worldwide as a model of museum installation.

What to notice

The courtyard's late-Gothic arcades and alternating stone textures show the Catalan Gothic manner that Matteo Carnalivari brought to Palermo at the end of the Quattrocento. The exhibition runs on two floors around a quadrangular courtyard: sculpture on the ground floor and the picture collection above. A dedicated room displays Antonello da Messina's Annunziata on a specially built wooden support, allowing it to be seen almost free of the wall. Scarpa's staircase, built from monolithic hexagonal steps of pietra di Carini balanced on a double steel beam, is an artwork in its own right. The fresco of the Trionfo della Morte, detached from its original location, stops most visitors in their tracks for its scale and its grim humour — death deals out cards and rides down courtiers, prostitutes and musicians without distinction.

Context and history

The city's tourism record traces the palace to Francesco Abatellis, port master of the kingdom and praetor of the city, who commissioned Matteo Carnalivari to raise it in the Catalan Gothic style. After Abatellis's death the building passed to a Benedictine convent, which added a chapel with cross vaults. The Ministry of Culture's architecture atlas records how the 1943 bombing damaged the palace heavily, and how the post-war recovery came in two stages: a first restoration by Mario Guiotto and Armando Dillon from 1950 to 1953, then the second restoration and museum installation by Carlo Scarpa in 1953–1954, commissioned when the new gallery was being assembled under Giorgio Vigni. The city portal has the Galleria Regionale della Sicilia in residence since 1953, making the collection one of the longest-running regional museums on the island. Further restoration and enlargement by Maria Santa Giunta and Guido Meli followed in 2007–2009. Alongside the famous paintings, the gallery keeps medieval Sicilian crosses, Arab-made artefacts and Seicento and Settecento painting.