A room with no unity of place or period
Nothing at first sight connects a Raphael panel painted in Perugia around 1502 with a Tiepolo canvas painted in Venice two centuries later: not the workshop, not the generation, not even the format. This room embraces that gap rather than hiding it, bringing together examples of Italian painting from the early sixteenth to the early eighteenth century — from the Florentine and Roman High Renaissance through to late Venetian Baroque.
The connecting thread is therefore not stylistic: it is that of an early nineteenth-century English private collection, capable of bringing together pieces from every Italian school without confining itself to a single period — the kind of selection no museum would put together the same way today.
1. Two fragments of a dispersed altarpiece
Saint Francis of Assisi and Saint Anthony of Padua, two small oil panels each measuring 25.6 by 16.4 centimetres, were painted by Raphael around 1502, while he was still working in Perugia within Perugino's orbit. They originally formed the two outer ends of the predella of the Colonna Altarpiece, a major commission painted for the Poor Clares of the church of Saint Anthony of Padua in Perugia — one of the rare early Raphael ensembles whose original destination is known with precision.
The altarpiece was dismembered, like so many others, after leaving the church for the art market: the central panel, along with one predella panel, is now at the Metropolitan Museum in New York; another predella panel is at the National Gallery in London; a third is at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. The two small saints at Dulwich are the last scattered fragments of this ensemble — not copies, not workshop pieces, but authentic fragments of an assembly now broken apart across two continents. Step closer: at this scale, each face fits in the palm of a hand.
2. Tiepolo and Ricci, eighteenth-century Venice
Two centuries separate these early Raphael fragments from the three canvases by Giambattista Tiepolo held in the same room, including The Resurrection, a swirling composition typical of his taste for figures thrown diagonally into an open sky — a vocabulary at the opposite pole from the calm frontality of the small panels nearby.
Sebastiano Ricci, of the same Venetian generation as Tiepolo, completes this last chronological layer of the room. One of his canvases at Dulwich dates from the end of his London stay, around 1714-1716: it is one of two known modelli (oil sketches) for the fresco in the apse of the chapel of the Royal Hospital, Chelsea — a rare record of a Venetian painter's preparatory work for a major English commission.
3. Guercino and Carlo Dolci, two seventeenth-century Italies
Guercino, a Bolognese painter active in the first half of the seventeenth century, is known for a dramatic chiaroscuro inherited from Caravaggio, applied equally to religious scenes and classical subjects. The two Guercino canvases at Dulwich make it possible to gauge this tension between shadow and light characteristic of Bolognese painting of his generation, in the line of the Carracci.
Carlo Dolci, a Florentine painter of the same period, takes the opposite approach to this pictorial violence: his religious figures, painted with an almost photographic precision, cultivate a soft, smooth piety, far removed from Guercino's contrasts. Between these two seventeenth-century Italian temperaments, the room offers two opposing ways of painting the sacred in the same era — one through the shock of light, the other through the softness of finish.
How much time
The two small Raphael panels are worth lingering over despite their modest size; the rest of the room can be covered more quickly, comparing temperaments rather than looking for a strict chronological thread.
- Saint Francis of Assisi and Saint Anthony of Padua (Raphael) — 8 minutes.
- Tiepolo and Ricci — 6 minutes.
- Guercino and Dolci — 6 minutes.
Sources and verification
Facts checked against the Dulwich Picture Gallery website, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and cross-checked sources (Art UK, Wikipedia FR/EN, Wikimedia Commons) for attributions, dates and the dispersal of works.
- Art UK — Saint Anthony of Padua (Dulwich Picture Gallery)
- Dulwich Picture Gallery — Saint Anthony of Padua
- Dulwich Picture Gallery — Saint Francis of Assisi
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art — Raphael, Saint Anthony of Padua (Colonna Altarpiece predella)
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art — Raphael, The Colonna Altarpiece
- Dulwich Picture Gallery — The Resurrection (Tiepolo)
- Wikimedia Commons — Paintings by Sebastiano Ricci in the Dulwich Picture Gallery
- Wikipedia EN — Saint Sebastian (Reni, Dulwich)
Displays and room openings can change. Check the Dulwich Picture Gallery website on the day of your visit before following a route.
Listen to the commentary in the gallery
This route gives you a thread to follow. In front of an artwork, CulturAll adds the audio commentary: photograph the work or its label, listen, then ask your questions.
