SABAUDA GALLERY, The Baroque

You're now in the large section dedicated to paintings from the 1600s and 1700s, a particularly congenial time in the Baroque, international Turin.

Thanks to the size and expressive power of some of the Italian and European masterpieces of this period, you can enjoy some very impressive works here. For example the splendid Annunciation by Orazio Gentileschi, which is dominated by a large red drape. Painted around 1623, you'll appreciate its fine balance between the frank realism of Caravaggio and the aristocratic taste with which he depicts the colors and folds of the fabrics.

Room after room, you'll find yourself admiring works by some of the protagonists of 17th-century Italian painting, like Emiliano Guercino or the main Lombard artists. But here too, your attention will inevitably be drawn to the foreign works. And above all those by Rubens, which are always powerful and lively; he is perhaps the most affirmed international painter of the first half of the seventeenth century. Looking at the two figures of the mythological hero Hercules and his beloved Deianira, you can see how the painter was inspired by ancient statues, but envelops the characters in rich, pasty color. One of Rubens' students in Antwerp was the great portraitist Anton Van Dyck, who I will talk about in the next file....