Among the works of 17th-century Italian artists on display in this room is a masterpiece by the great innovator of painting Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610) – The Lute-Player, painted around 1595. The picture, presented as a genre scene, is an elaborate allegory with many meanings, one of the main motifs of which is probably love and harmony.
The putative creator of another Lute-Player is a follower of Caravaggio, the Frenchman Nicolas Tournier (1590 – after 1657), who worked for a time in Rome.
Domenico Fetti (1588/89–1623) is represented by paintings on biblical subjects and the outstanding Portrait of an Actor (Tristano Martinelli?).
Flowers and a Bust of Pan it is one of the few signed still lifes by Peirano Genovese (active in the late 17th and early 18th centuries).
The display case contains bozzetti – three-dimensional clay sketches – by the “Genius of the Baroque” Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680) for some of his famous works: the sculptural group The Ecstasy of St Theresa, the equestrian statue of Constantine the Great and The Angel with the Superscription.
