School of Ferrara wpe3D.jpg (781 byte)

This room is situated on the First Floor

Originally this small room was dedicated to the paintings of the Ferrarese School (I6th century), so much beloved by Cardinal Borghese as well as by many other Roman noblemen. The Ferrarese School paintings were valuable and not too expensive because the town of Ferrara became the property of the Vatican in 1597, when the powerful Cardinal Vincenzo Bentivoglio influenced the purchase and bringing to Rome of these paintings.

St.Thomas Unbelief
In this room one can see the masterpieces of the main painters from Ferrara, in the Renaissance: Mazzolino, Garofalo, Ortolano while the paintings of Dossi are in Room No. 15.

One work by Mazzolino is St. Thomas Unbelief (1522), a smalì table whose colours shine so much they look as if they had been glazed. A more dramatic and crowded painting is The Grief over Dead Jesus Christ, by Ortolano (1521). It is a painting with many references to the Venetian School (15th century), as one can see by the many colours and details of the country landscape.On the ceiling, adorned by garlands and grotesques, Vincenzo Berrettini painted Ganimede’s stories (1790), the young boy who was kidnapped by Zeus in eagle’s clothing and who became the god’s cup-bearer.