Palazzo Ducale

The Gonzaga dynasty ruled Mantua from a palace the size of a town: courtyards, gardens and hundreds of rooms packed between Piazza Sordello and the lake. Inside wait some of the Renaissance's defining images — Mantegna's painted chamber, tapestries drawn from Raphael, Pisanello's chivalric frescoes — and, in one wing, a pair of Neolithic skeletons.

Why it matters

The Palazzo Ducale is one of the largest court complexes in Europe, around 35,000 square metres of accumulated residence that grew from the late thirteenth century into a princely capital. It is not a single building but a city of halls — Corte Vecchia, Corte Nuova, the Castello di San Giorgio, apartments and basilica — and it preserves the Gonzagas' artistic ambition at every turn: Giulio Romano's Appartamento di Troia, the tapestry cycle woven after Raphael's designs, Rubens's altarpiece for the Gonzaga altar. Mantegna's Camera degli Sposi alone would justify the trip; together, the complex makes Mantua a first-rank Renaissance destination.

What to notice

• The Camera Picta, or Camera degli Sposi, in the Castello di San Giorgio: Andrea Mantegna's illusionistic fresco cycle of 1465–1474, with the Gonzaga family at court and the celebrated oculus on the ceiling.
• The Sala del Pisanello, where the court painter's unfinished Arthurian cycle of the mid-fifteenth century survives in extraordinary fragments — rediscovered and restored in the 1960s, among the last great works of chivalric Gothic painting.
• The tapestry cycle after Raphael's Acts of the Apostles cartoons, woven for the Gonzaga.
• Giulio Romano's Appartamento di Troia and the restored state rooms of Corte Nuova, with the palace's mature Renaissance interiors.
• Rubens's altarpiece, painted in Mantua for the Gonzaga, still in the dynastic setting it was made for.
• The Sala dell'Alcova in Corte Vecchia, where canvases from the palace deposits — including works connected with Pisanello's circle — are shown in rotating displays.
• The National Archaeological Museum within the complex, housed in the shell of the old Gonzaga court theatre near Piazza Sordello and home of the Lovers of Valdaro, which extends the site's timeline back five millennia.

Context and history

The complex grew by accretion around the Bonacolsi residences that the Gonzagas took over in 1328, expanding across four centuries into the interconnected palaces, gardens and service courts you see today. Under Ludovico Gonzaga in the fifteenth century the court attracted Mantegna, Alberti and Pisanello; in the sixteenth, under Federico II, it was a ducal capital with Giulio Romano as its impresario, and Duke Guglielmo's surveyor Giovan Battista Bertani bound the scattered buildings into one organism from 1556 onwards, while the palatine basilica of Santa Barbara rose between 1562 and 1572. The sale of much of the Gonzaga collection in the late 1620s, the sack of Mantua in 1630 and the dynasty's loss of power in 1707 contributed to the dispersal of the palace's treasures.

The state museum that now runs the palace continues to grow back into its own fabric: restored halls of Corte Nuova have reopened in recent years, the prisons of the Castello di San Giorgio and the south-west tower walkways have been opened to visitors, and deposit paintings are being brought into the light. The 2012 Emilia earthquakes closed the palace for nearly three years, and the reopening of Mantegna's chamber in April 2015 marked its return as a working museum. The palace remains a research institution of the Ministry of Culture.