Galleria Sabauda

The Galleria Sabauda is the picture gallery of the House of Savoy, assembled by the dynasty from the late sixteenth century onward and opened to the public by King Charles Albert in 1832. Installed since 2014 in the Manica Nuova wing of Turin's Royal Museums, it spans Piedmontese Renaissance masters, Italian old masters and prized Flemish and Dutch paintings.

Why it matters

Few Italian dynasties collected as systematically as the Savoy, and the gallery preserves the results intact on their home ground. Charles Albert founded the public pinacoteca on 2 October 1832 — his birthday — placing it first in Palazzo Madama; the core came from dynastic holdings accumulated since the late sixteenth century, enriched by the celebrated purchase of the Durazzo collection from a Genoese palazzo. In 1860 Victor Emmanuel II donated the whole gallery to the state, an unusually generous act that fixed it as a national collection. Today its more than eight hundred works trace the dynasty's taste across three floors: Piedmontese painting of the Renaissance below, Italian and northern masters of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries above, and views, Flemish pictures and modern acquisitions at the top. For Turin, it is the artistic counterweight to the palace rooms next door.

What to notice

Work upward through the three floors in order. The ground floor introduces the Piedmontese masters of the Renaissance, painters who worked for the ducal court and the monasteries of the region — a school rarely seen in depth outside Turin. The first floor holds the Italian old masters: a Madonna and Child by Beato Angelico, works by Mantegna, Veronese's Supper in the house of Simon, an Annunciation by Orazio Gentileschi and paintings by Guido Reni. On the second floor, look for Bernardo Bellotto's precise views of eighteenth-century Turin, which let you compare the city then and now, and the Flemish and Dutch paintings from the collection of Prince Eugene of Savoy-Soissons, evidence of the dynasty's international reach. The second floor also rotates between the Gualino collection, acquired in 1930, with a Duccio Madonna and Child and Botticelli's Venus, and the Prince Eugene holdings. The Leonardo Space on the first floor presents the gallery's related autograph material.

Context and history

The gallery's accumulation began in the sixteenth century, when the Savoy court at Turin, Chambéry and beyond started commissioning and buying on a princely scale. Two acquisitions defined the collection: the Durazzo purchase from Genoa in the eighteenth century, which brought whole crates of Italian masters north, and Prince Eugene's Flemish and Dutch holdings entering the dynastic orbit. Charles Albert's 1832 foundation made these private treasures public, and the gallery's successive homes — Palazzo Madama, then from 1865 the palace on Via Accademia delle Scienze, and since 2014 the Manica Nuova of the Royal Palace — map the history of Turin's museums themselves. Victor Emmanuel II's donation to the state in 1860 preceded the palace's own passage to the nation, tying the gallery's fate to the Royal Museums, of which it is now one of the principal sections together with the Royal Palace, the Armoury, the Library and the Museum of Antiquities.