Due to the current pandemic, Italy's museums and galleries have all been closed over the recent holidays. However, museum directors and exhibition curators have not remained idle, ensuring instead that work has continued behind the scenes so that they will be ready for the public when the ban is lifted.

One of the most original exhibitions on standby is at the National Gallery of Ancient Art in the splendid baroque Palazzo Barberini, Rome. Entitled “L'Ora dello Spettatore” (“The Moment of the Beholder”), it offers a fresh and unusual slant on viewing works of art, in which the visitor is deliberately invited to “enter” and participate in the paintings on display. The exhibition aims to reveal hidden details and ambiguities incorporated in the works, which would be missed by the casual viewer, with figures frozen in frames, others semi-concealed behind curtains, the hidden seductive messages in discarded shoes, the symbolism of hearts hanging like fruit from trees and a ball game where the ball is a globe of the world.

The exhibition, curated by art historian Michele De Monte, contains works from Palazzo Barberini's own collection, as well as a number of works on loan from some of the world's most prestigious galleries, such as the National Gallery of London, the Prado of Madrid and the Rijksmuseum of the Netherlands.

Tiepoli's “Il Mondo Novo” (“New World”) opens the show and provides the key for interpreting the exhibition theme. It depicts a crowd leaning over a wall to observe some scene below in the street below, but the spectator only sees their backs and can only guess at what has attracted their attention. Rembrandt's “Girl in a Picture Frame”, seems to actually emerge from her frame with her hands leaning on a window sill, while Bartolomeo Passerotti's two sly butchers invite viewers to inspect their wares. The conspiratorial little Cupid in Il Guercino's “Venus, Mars and Cupid” aims his bow directly at the viewer, thus involving him/her in the scene. An exhausted Christ appeals for help out of Memling's miniature narrative of the “Passion of Christ.”

Poussin's “Ovid and the Games of Love”, crammed with secret suggestions and symbolism that the observer is invited to discover, closes the exhibition.

The exhibition opened at the beginning of December and ran for only a short time before it was forced to close down for precautionary measures. Programmed originally to run until the end of February, organizers hope that it will eventually be prolonged and allow all the “Beholders” more than a “Moment” to enjoy it!

M. Stenhouse

Info: www.barberinicorsini.org