Collection
The Barracco Museum consists of a prestigious collection of antique sculpture (Assyrian, Egyptian, Cypriot, Phoenician, Etruscan, Greek and Roman art) which Giovanni Barracco, a rich Calabrese nobleman, donated to the Municipality of Rome in 1904. After having dedicated his life to the retrieval of masterpieces, acquiring them on the antiquities market and recovering them from the major archaeological excavations which took place through Rome in the years 1870-1903 as part of the urban transformation thought necessary to transform the city into the capital. The collection, from 1948, was displayed in the Farnese Palace in the Street of the Trunk makers, an elegant sixteenth century building erected for the Breton Thomas Le Roy in 1516, to a design by Antonio da Sangallo the younger.
Egyptian art is represented by examples from throughout its history, from the earliest dynasty (3000 BC) until the Roman period.
From Mesopotamia there are examples of precious Assyrian slabs, wall decorations from the palace of Assurbanipal at Nineveh and Sennacherib at Nimrud from the VII and VI centuries BC.
Unusually for an Italian museum, there is a section devoted to Cypriot art, which holds several rare objects, such as the multi-coloured votive cart and the head of Heracles from the VII-VI centuries BC.
The Greek art sections boasts numerous originals with votive and funerary slabs, a series of Greek works giving an exhaustive picture of the great Vth century BC artist Polyclitus and his school.
Among the Roman art, the head of a boy from the Julian family is outstanding, evidence of the refined private portraiture of the early imperial era (Ist century AD).
Finally, provincial art is also represented by three slabs from Palmyra, a caravan city which flourished from the IInd century AD.
This historical journey through the evolution an ancient sculpture, which Giovanni Barracco called in one of his writings “the mother of all the arts”, closes with a polychrome mosaic of the Church of Rome, from the first basilica of St Peter in Rome, dating to the XIIth century AD.