Pinacoteca Metropolitana Corrado Giaquinto

The Metropolitan Art Gallery Corrado Giaquinto occupies the Palazzo della Provincia on Bari's seafront. Its collections bring together Venetian and Neapolitan paintings, Byzantine icons and Apulian works, alongside nineteenth- and twentieth-century Italian art, including the Grieco Collection.

Why it matters

Founded on 12 July 1928, the gallery brought together paintings held with the provincial archaeological museum, works deposited by churches and convents, loans from the national galleries of Naples and Rome, and purchases by the Province of Bari. Its collections trace artistic connections across the Adriatic and southern Italy, from Byzantine icons and medieval sculpture to Venetian and Neapolitan painting and modern Italian art.

What to notice

The Venetian collection includes works associated with the Vivarini, Giovanni Bellini, Paris Bordon, Veronese and Tintoretto. The Neapolitan rooms span artists from Marco Pino and Matthias Stom to Luca Giordano, Francesco Solimena and Francesco De Mura. Apulian works include Byzantine icons, Romanesque and Frederician sculpture, and paintings by Oronzo Tiso.

Donations helped shape the nineteenth-century collection. Works entered through gifts by Cifariello, Bianchi and Ferrara, including paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Federico Netti and Giuseppe Altamura. The Grieco Collection adds Italian paintings by artists including Giovanni Fattori, Silvestro Lega, Pellizza da Volpedo, Giorgio Morandi and Felice Casorati.

Context and history

The gallery's collections grew through donations of applied art and photography as well as painting. The De Gemmis donation of Apulian ceramics arrived in 1957, followed by the Caleno nativity scene in 1958. The photographic archive of Vincenzo Simone, comprising about 14,000 glass plates documenting Bari's transformation, entered the collections in the 1980s. The Grieco Collection was acquired as a group of fifty paintings, and a long-term deposit from Banco di Napoli enriched the Neapolitan sequence from 2003. The gallery bears the name of the eighteenth-century painter Corrado Giaquinto; related plaster casts are displayed in the Castello Svevo.