Absolutely phenomenal museum…read more
One not to be missed.
And with 5% of the tourists of Rome's other museums, and no wait to get in line.
There is no downside.
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GNAM is the nineteenth and twentieth century art museum of Rome.
If you want stuff that was painted yesterday, there are galleries of 21st century art around town. Enjoy at your peril.
Everything in GNAM that was painted or sculpted before 1960 is an absolute masterpiece.
And there is a lot of lively stuff in the newer material too.
It is easy to forget in a city with all of the Roman antiquities, all of the medieval treasures and Rome's fantastic legacy of Renaissance and Baroque art,
That Italy was just as talented in the 19th and 20th centuries as it was in the previous periods.
Our "standard" art histories moves European Art history of the 1800s and 1900s to France.
Italy could go toe to toe with France on every artistic movement that occurred after Napoleon and this includes Romanticism, Impressionism and Modernism.
There are paintings in GNAM that fully anticipate every formal innovation of impressionism. They were painted in the 1860s and 1870's.
Monet and Renoir would be "inventing" impressionism thirty years later.
The nineteenth century working class realism paintings of Courbet are blown away with the soulful depictions of working class life that were painted in Italy ... and yes twenty years before Courbet.
There are night landscape paintings here that are darker and more intense than anything you could see in the Louvre.
There is portraiture to die for - including my favorite "beautiful woman" painting of all time.
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GNAM is huge, and excellent throughout.
But there is one utterly amazing room that can fill your whole stay.
If you go straight from the front door through a "seating gallery", you walk into an enormous room that is literally the size of a football field.
The ceilings are sixty feet high.
This is the primary room of the nineteenth century Romantic Era collection.
Every single square millimeter of wall space is hung with paintings.
You are looking at five or six paintings one on top of each other going up the wall all the way up sixty feet high and this being repeated every three yards for the entire room, all four walls.
There are easily over 200 large paintings in this room - maybe closer to 300.
There is not a loser or a boring painting anywhere in the room.
And - to give a sense of the remarkable level of activity that Italy enjoyed in the Romantic Era, no artist is represented by more than two paintings.
Most artists only have one selection.
Thus you are looking at a room that is displaying between 100 and 150 different nineteenth century Italian artists - with each selection being one of the best paintings that artist ever created.
The spectacle is mind-boggling.
Close examination makes each painting better and better and better.
There are all sorts of compositional subtleties, painterly tricks and psychological/philosophical subtexts in the works that only become apparent in a long viewing.
Well over 80% of my visit to GNAM was spent in that one room.
And even at that - I only saw about 1/5 of the paintings that are there.
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This is a museum that will change your opinion about much of what you understand about art.
Plan to come here.
Plan to spend a lot of time here.
This is one of the great collections of the world.
