The National Galleries of Ancient Art present from 24 October 2019 to 2 February 2020, in the headquarters of Galleria Corsini, the exhibition "The enigma of reality. Portraits and still lifes from the Poletti Collection and the Barberini Corsini National Galleries", curated by Paola Nicita.

The exhibition presents about thirty works never exhibited in Rome from the collection of Geo Poletti (Milan 9 April 1926 - Lenno 13 September 2012), art historian, connoisseur, painter and collector, compared with some paintings in the museum and a 'work from the National Museum of Warsaw.
An exhibition strongly desired by the director Flaminia Gennari Santori who underlines: “as for the Mapplethorpe exhibition, also on this occasion we continue at the Corsini Gallery with the exploration of collecting, both as a practice and as a cultural category”.

Most of the seventeenth-century still lifes will be exhibited, from those of the Roman Caravaggesque area, to the Emilian “Kitchens”, from the more sober and intimate Lombard still lifes, to the still lifes of Bernardo Strozzi and the renewed realism of Caravaggesque inspiration by Evaristo Baschenis from Bergamo.
Two important still lifes depicting vases of flowers and fruit attributed by Geo Poletti to Caravaggio himself will be compared with a still life with tuberus preserved in Palazzo Barberini and usually not exposed to the public.