The episode depicted is taken from the book of Genesis - Stories of Joseph. The Jewish Joseph, son of Jacob and Rachel, after suffering imprisonment, is released from prison by virtue of his ability to interpret the dreams of the Pharaoh of Egypt. Appointed minister, he was sent to carry out an extensive survey of the cereal products intended for food existing in the country in view of the famine he had predicted. The painting shows the departure of Joseph wearing a suit of fine linen (fine linen cloth) and seated on a splendid golden chariot drawn by fiery white horses; a young flute player precedes him. In the background you can see the caravan of companions mixed with dancing girls to the sound of tambourines. In the background a fantasy Egypt, evoked by memory, or rather by transferring into an image the conventional idea of the ancient where the regulation banana trees appear, but also Roman temples, arches, pyramids in a disheveled and picturesque vision of the ancient that is typical of the era. It is the triumph of the fairy tale with a happy ending, the feast of color and the triumph of painting. The evanescent, almost tapestry colors (powder blue, light green, ivory, greyish), raised here and there by pieces of red, make the painting so light and precious as to seem "blown" like Murano glass.

The small painting exhibits a very immediate and cursive Abbati, who with rapid brushstrokes constructs the figure of a peasant girl with an apron and hat, posing with a bundle of grass in her hands next to a large terracotta jar and a barrel. The lean brushstroke, almost rubbed on the table, exploits the color and veins of the latter in the face and in the stone and brick wall of the background. The dating of the painting varies between 1859 and 1865.

The panel was originally located in the chapel of the same title in the Dominican church of Santa Maria la Nova in Monopoli - an Apulian town on the Adriatic coast, which was administered directly by the Republic of Venice between 1495 and 1530 - from which it was subsequently transferred to the church. of San Domenico, built on the same area starting from 1530. Contrary to what has been reported so far, the patronage of the chapel of San Pietro Martire, which we know is contiguous to that of San Girolamo and Santo Stefano (Single Diocesan Archive of Monopoli, Selva d'oro E. 495) did not belong to the Indelli family - which instead owned the chapel of San Domenico, from which comes the painting by Jacopo Palma the Younger depicting San Domenico with Santa Caterina d'Alessandria, Santa Marta and Santa Maria Maddalena, erroneously indicated as San Domenico Soriano (GLIANES, 1643, p. 48; n. Ed. 1994, p. 80; INDELLI Ms 1779, ch. XIV, 56, ed. 2000, p. 439), now in the Diocesan Museum of Monopoly - but with an unidentified family. In 1870, following the suppression of the convents, Bellini's painting passed into the local Town Hall and from here, in order to ensure its conservation, at the Provincial Museum of Bari, where it is already present around the end of the 1920s, and later in the Pinacoteca. In 1948 the painting was restored by the Central Institute of Restoration in Rome. On this occasion, given the presence of the drawings on the back, partly superimposed on the butterfly brackets that unite the two vertical axes of which the table is formed, it was decided not to reduce the embossing, which was however not very accentuated. Currently, there is a slight longitudinal crack at the junction of the axes and the protective paint is considerably oxidized. The monumental figure of St. Peter the martyr, with a bearded face slightly reclined to the right, stands out against a clear background represented by the laying surface and the parapet behind, both in breccia of Verona (clear allusion to the city of origin of the saint) of a very hot salmon color, and from the deep blue sky on which two registers of soft whitish cirrus seem to pass softly. A midday light, warm and natural, illuminates the scene, highlighting, in a very clever play of chromatic transitions, the rendering of the shadows (that of the figure of the saint projected on the laying surface and that of the black mantle on the white scapular of the Dominican). Particularly realistic is the rendering of the billhook and the dagger fixed in the head and chest of the saint, in which skilful highlights restore the shimmer of the metal, and the splendid reddish leather binding, decorated with relief candelabra and medallions, of the book shown with the right. .

It was purchased in 1936, directly by the artist, who then lived in Milan, where he had established himself as a late exponent of Lombard Impressionism having studied at the Brera Academy with Vespasiano Bignami and Cesare Tallone. Well-made and witty - the range of blacks is also very refined - the painting seems to be a portrait of a soubrette or a woman in the attitude of a femme fatale. The canvas undoubtedly dates back to the years of Amisani's maturity when he was a sought-after portraitist of Milanese high society.

It is an eighteenth-century genre scene, typical of the production of the Spanish artist who after studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid had frequented the studio of Jean-Leon Gerome in Paris. Set in an elegant interior, the image does not lack any of the motifs usually recurring in this genre of painting; note also the painting in the background, a gallant scene placed in the alcove, which reinforces the story in the foreground.

It is a variation of the theme of the Mountains canvas that accompanied the artist for several decades of his activity. In a very significant statement, Sironi comments on his landscaping, which never was such in the conventional sense: "I was reproached for not occupying cultivated fields, picturesque gardens, valleys, hills, seaside houses and similar nonsense - but to see only deserted rocks, desolate altitudes where man measures himself with the vastness of the spirit. Well, many come to Cortina and they should have seen a night of full and clear moon over the immense valley, where like thrones of silver and glass the snowy peaks listen to the voice of God in the immense space. They have seen and have not understood. The little house and a quart of the sea by the painter of canvases are here related to the peaks of the Croda Nera del Sorapis and the Antelao slilla platform of the Earth "

Received under delivery in 1929 by the Pinacoteca of the National Museum of Naples, this small portrait of a woman comes in ancient times from the Parma collections of the Sanseverino family and therefore of the Farnese family. The number 789 inscribed twice on the back - one in black paint, and the other in red sealing wax makes it possible to identify it effortlessly in the "Portrait of a young woman dressed in antique black with silver trinetina with frappe, and cross of joys, which hangs in front of them, on the head an adorned with joys and white pen, by Mano Fiamenga n. 789 "described in n. 741 of the inventory of the Farnese residence of the Garden in Parma and exhibited there, together with other portraits and religious subjects, in the "First Room of the Apartment of the Ladies of Modona" (see BERTINI, 1987, p. 265). On the other hand, the notarial seal drawn in pen on the same back of the tablet and the signatures of the notary, Francesco Moreschi, and of the consignee Grandini, as well as the barely legible number 27 in black, make it possible to establish that the Farnese had come into possession of the picture in 1612 and on the occasion of the seizure of assets from the rebel feudal lords, among which the Sanseverinos stood out, in whose palace in Parma, at no. 27 of the inventory drawn up by the notary Moreschi and Grandini, was precisely "another portrait of a Spanish-style lady painted on the walnut board with [...] a hat on her head, with many joys inside, signed and signed "by the delegates to that seizure (cf. BERTINI, 1977, p. 38).

Sent on deposit by the National Museum of Naples to the Provincial Art Gallery of Bari in September 1929, this remarkable painting is part of a group of six canvases which - as De Rinaldis (1911, pp. 523,646; 1928, p. 318) already pointed out - they were donated in 1807 by the monks of the local convent of Sant'Efremo Nuovo to Giuseppe Bonaparte for the newly established Gallery of Neapolitan painters (SPINAZZOLA, 1899, p. 46; FILANGIERI DI CANDIDA, 1902, pp. 240, 331 note 98). Despite the authoritative opinion of Nicolson (1977), later taken up by Tecce in cat. London 1982 - which raised doubts about the origin of this series in light of the differences in subject with the canvases actually described in Sant'Efremo by Sigismondo (1788-1789) and by Chiarini (1856-60), the donative list of 1807 and the indications of provenance placed by the Arditi in support of the inventory of the Royal Bourbon Museum of 1821 do not in fact allow any perplexity as to the fact that the liberated Saint Peter - as well as the Holy Family, Christ in Emmaus, the Prophet Jeremiah and the Capture of Christ today preserved in the Capodimonte Museum and the Adoration of the Shepherds now under delivery at the Royal Palace in Naples - were part of that group of "many paintings at night, estimated by Matteo Tomar" cited by Celano (1692) precisely in Sant'Efremo Nuovo and later highly praised also by de 'Dominici (1742-45). In the absence of documents or other certain origins from ancient times, the nucleus of Sant'Efremo constitutes the most solid axis for the reconstruction of the still hazy Neapolitan stay of the Stom, which can be placed in the narrow years between the Roman records of 1630-1632 and the first work dated by the painter in Sicily, Sant'Isidoro di Caccamo (1641). Unlike in the later Sicilian production, characterized by greater monumentality and compositional complexity, the liberated San Pietro and the other paintings presumably produced in Naples betray a rigor of a Caravaggesque matrix and a warm luminism inspired by the "nocturnal" solutions of the proclaimed master Stom's Flemish, Gerrit von Hontorst. The San Pietro in particular, with its park but spectacular accord of whites, reds, golden browns, is one of the most significant examples of all.

The painting depicts, through a composition studied in the progressive thinning of the figures upwards, the apparition of the Eternal Father to a large group of plague victims in which, in the foreground, on the right side, San Rocco, who intercedes with favor of the victims of the plague. The Saint, who traveled throughout Europe dedicating himself to the care of the plague victims, is in fact invoked against plagues. Probably the painting is an ex voto made by the patrons, the Effrem, who perhaps fortunately escaped the disease. The painting, an autograph work by the artist, has often been considered a workshop work or the result of the collaboration of Tintoretto with his son Domenico, or with Leonardo Corona, or with Jacopo Palma the younger, due to the qualitative and stylistic differences between the upper and the lower one; the latter, in fact, is chromatically more deaf with respect to the characteristic brightness of Tintoretto, which is well noticeable instead in the upper part. But, thanks to a recent restoration carried out very wisely, it is precisely in the lower register that the exquisiteness of the color emerges with greater clarity. A color sometimes given with contemptuous, energetic brushstrokes that draw the crests of the drapery, in other cases almost “crawled” on the canvas, as if to clean the brush. The date 1595, which has no relation to that of the execution of the painting, may have been affixed in ancient times, probably when the work was "taken over" by the Chapter of the Cathedral of Bari.

The plaster, a unique work, was purchased in 1941 by the Professional Fascist Confederation and Artists, with the title The prisoner. Exhibited at the III Roman Biennale in 1925, it was noted as a sculpture of remarkable quality, made by a young Apulian artist whose "it is legitimate to foresee a happy future" (LANCELLOTT1, 1926, p. 96). In the work, performed in the artist's early Roman years, after a period of crisis and loneliness, almost "as a materialization of his own feeling of defeat" (VINNUTELLI, 1925, p. 134), influences and suggestions of a very different nature converge , ranging from Greco-Roman art to Michelangelo's work and Adolfo Wildt's sculptures. In all likelihood, the groups of figures in the pediments of the temple of Zeus in Olympia and the Belvedere Torso were decisive from antiquity, while Michelangelo's sculptures should be mentioned in the Medici tombs in the New Sacristy in San Lorenzo in Florence. Of Wildt's works, which had impressed Martinez, remember the headless torso Il crociato, from 1906 (dispersed bronze; plaster is found in Ca 'Pesaro, Galleria Internazionale d'Arte Moderna, Venice), the marble Vir temporis acti, 1911 (dispersed), which proposes a very similar torso, and in general the concept and treatment of the face, emaciated and smooth, interpreted as a mask of pain. And on a mask, of uncertain meaning - perhaps it is a reminder of the general theme of pain - the hands of the Vanquished rest, crossed behind his back. The introduction of the style of the torso was made necessary since only in this way, with the cut of the legs at the height of the knees, could the figure reach that closed, rounded shape desired by the artist.

The icon, restored by Colarieti Tosti in 1919, together with the Santa Margherita (cat., Apulian painting, 4) and the Madonna with Child (cat., Apulian painting, 8) comes from the noble church of Santa Margherita in Bisceglie, founded in 1197 da Falco, of the noble Falcone family. Later passed, together with the church, in the property of the Sifola, the Frisari and finally the Berarducci counts, it was purchased in 1964 by the Province of Bari and destined for the Pinacoteca, which promoted its restoration, curated by the then Superintendence of Monuments and to the Gallerie della Puglia, which took place in 1967. The support, unusually thin or perhaps thinned on the back with a rudimentary gouge, has on the front a lowered central area compared to a large band that surrounds it like a frame. A groove profile 1 strip, of which a portion remains on the right margin, was applied to the entire outer margin. The removal, in 1967, of the heavy antiquing patina dating back to the intervention of Colarieti Tosti restored its chromatic appearance to the image and brought to light large areas hitherto hidden by the stucco; but at the same time highlighted the irreparable damage suffered by the painting. A conspicuous gap separates the central image from the left side frame, at the junction of the panels, while the scenes in the lower band are strongly incomplete. Other drops of color affect the upper margin, corresponding to the first four scenes of the cycle. In the central field the background gold, almost completely fallen, is replaced by a yellowish background that humiliates the preciousness of the table. The backgrounds of the scenes are in better condition, where large traces of the original gold can still be seen on which Latin inscriptions traced in red stand out in a fragmentary state. The central part houses the holosome figure of the saint, in a frontal position, dressed in bishop's robes with cross-shaped omophorion falling on the front. With his right hand he blesses in the Greek style while holding the volume of the Gospels in the veiled left. On the sides of the white head and surrounded by a halo, reduced to a simple disc now devoid of the original gilding, the small figures of Christ and the Virgin stand out, one handing the book, the other the omophorion, insignia removed from the saint, according to the legendary tradition, following his angry excesses towards Arius during the Council of Nicaea. On the high relief band that forms the frame, the scenes of life and miracles are arranged according to an order of reading from left to right, by registers (instead of according to a continuous reading of the four bands, as in the Byzantine examples) and with a particular research rhythmic correspondences between the pairs of scenes which are entrusted with the representation of the various episodes.

The panel, together with the twin with San Nicola (Cat. II. 3) and the Madonna with Child (Cat. II. 9), comes from the noble church of Santa Margherita di Bisceglie, of the noble Falcone family, in which it is remembered, but not on the altar, until the 1920s. Passed with the church to the Sifola, to the Frisari and finally to the Berarducci counts, it was purchased in 1963 by the Province of Bari for the Pinacoteca, which it promoted. Never subjected to a complete restoration but only to conservative and light cleaning interventions, it has suffered irreparable damage especially in the lower part, where the color has fallen, exposing the primer or at times the support, and along the left side margin, strongly incomplete . Showy cracks cross it longitudinally at the junctions of the three boards of which it is made, stopped only by two rough crosspieces nailed to the back. The gold background is incomplete and integrated in several points. On the iconographic level, the panel closely resembles that of San Nicola, of which it was alternatively considered a model or derivation. Here we will limit ourselves to considering them twins, however rejecting the hypothesis that they originally formed a diptych. The setting is similar, with the holosome figure of the Saint, rigidly frontal, lowered with respect to the high edge that acts as a frame. The prayerful position gives maximum prominence to the princely attire: a red cloak with reseda green lining embellished with a diagonal lattice motif, stopped at the neck by a brooch and edged with two rows of small pearls, which the open and raised arms open in two handles on a blue tunic vigorously highlighted in white enriched by a jeweled stole; the tips of the red shoes come out from the hem of the robe; the head is enclosed in a dark blue cap; the features of the face are decidedly marked and plastically detected by strong brushstrokes, without subtleties of transitions. Unlike in the San Nicola, the very large nimbus is raised from the bottom. The explanatory writings of the scenes are missing, which are arranged along the high raised edge that serves as a frame. The story of Marina, an Antiochian virgin and martyr, who became Margaret in the Latin translation of the Passio, unfolds in chronological order with a trend of reading by registers, from left to right, from top to bottom.

The surviving triptych shows, in the central compartment, the young Virgin seated on a narrow wooden throne with a concave back, wearing an antique pink robe and a blue cloak lined with green, and a white veil on her head, while, with a demure gaze lowered, she holds a muscular Child standing on her lap, with her hips encircled by a transparent thong. In the lateral compartments, St. Benedict and St. Scholastica are depicted standing on circular marble pedestals. The restoration of 1996-1997 revealed that the crosier, made to design and devoid of tablet inserts, which today identifies San Benedetto, is a later addition, from the sixteenth century, and that the saint was most likely originally San Leonardo. On the occasion of the restoration, the panel with St. Benedict was then returned to its original size by adding a vast integration at the bottom. The back of each compartment has been appropriately parked.

Carved and figured on both faces, the cross must have housed, in the central panel of the front face, a fragment of the True Cross, as indicated by the cruciform housing, now empty. On the vertical arm of the recto of the cross the following scenes are depicted, starting from the top, the following scenes: Incredulity of St. Thomas, Crucifixion, Descent of Jesus into Limbo; on the short arms: one Evangelist (or Prophet) on each side; on the reverse: Annunciation, Baptism of Christ, Presentation in the Temple, two Evangelists (or Prophets). Of refined quality in the very fine carving that even reproduces, in the minute lattice of the engravings, the effect of the chrysographies, the cross is part of a large group, scattered in numerous churches and museums in Italy and abroad and produced mostly by monks of Mount Athos (hence the name of the Atonite cross), characterized by lenticular precision and meticulous attention to detail. The recent cleaning to which the silver frame was subjected revealed that it, already considered the work of Trapani workers of the seventeenth century, is actually contemporary with the cross and datable to the sixteenth century. The presence, on both faces, of diamond-pointed rhomboid studs, however, excludes the possibility of a pectoral cross, as was believed in the past.

The two small pictures with glued threads acquired by the Provincial Art Gallery of Bari are linked by the theme, linked to the hermit life and meditation: it is therefore possible that both were painted for a female monastery, as an exempla of penitential and contemplative life. The first has as its protagonist Maria Egiziaca, with very long hair that covers her breasts, dressed only in a mantle that leaves her knees and feet uncovered, kneeling to receive communion from the monk Zosimo, standing in front of her.

The work depicts one of the many miracles performed by St. Nicholas after his death. This is the episode that sees the Saint invoked by a group of sailors led by a monk in a white robe, surprised by the storm unleashed by the devil who shot down the sail of the boat. St. Nicholas appears in front of the sea and calms the waters. The storm is moving away: the swollen gray clouds tend to tear apart, giving way to the serene. A celestial apparition closes the composition: the image of the Immaculate Virgin portrayed sitting on the clouds with the crescent moon at her feet.

Saint Mary Magdalene, with long blond hair, is half-stretched on the bank of a river, her arms and shoulders resting on a stony rise on which the cross and the skull, her usual iconographic attributes, rests. The scene is set in a wooded landscape that can be glimpsed beyond the great halo of golden light, in which little angels and cherubs whirl, towards which the attention of the Saint turns. The scenes depicted in both squares belong to the eremitical iconographic current destined for edifying and devotional purposes.

The scene depicted is taken from an episode of the Iliad (Canto X) in which it is said that the two Greek heroes (Ulysses and Diomedes) introduced in the Thracian camp, kill King Reso to take possession of his precious weapons and his white horses. , which according to what was predicted by the oracle, if they had drank in the waters of the Scamander river, they would have made Troy impregnable. Homer's narrative describes a bloody moment of high tension, but the scene in the painting reveals nothing tragic. The two killers, in fact, are portrayed in studied poses and the expression makes them look more like opera singers in the act of intoning an aria of particular emphasis. The brightest area of the painting shows Reso who, unaware of the fate he will have to suffer, sleeps peacefully on a soft bed. Everything takes place in the king's tent, depicted by a rich and soft drapery tied with a silk cord, so much so that it resembles the heavy curtain of a stage on which the characters act.

The print depicts the scene of the last meal that Jesus ate with his disciples in Jerusalem before his arrest. Christ and his Apostles are depicted around a table, not all seated, but some lying on tricliniums. This particular representation is taken from the corresponding canvas of the Seven Sacraments by Nicolas Poussin, painted in two versions, of which the first (1636-1642) kept in Belvoir Castle, the second (1644-1648) in storage at the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh.