The National Picture Gallery is located in the former Jesuit novitiate of Saint Ignatius. The museum, now completely renovated (1997) in its structures according to the most modern conservative and museographic criteria, offers visitors a fascinating journey through Emilian painting from the 13th to the 18th century. Now part of the most important European art collections, the picture gallery was founded in 1808 as a picture gallery of the Academy of Fine Arts and became an independent museum in 1882. For the fourteenth century there are works by Vitale, Pseudo Jacopino, Simone dei Crocefissi and Jacopo di Paolo, Giotto and Lorenzo Veneziano, as well as one of the largest national collections of detached fourteenth-century frescoes (such as those from the Church of Mezzaratta). In the Renaissance section, paintings by Vivarini, Cossa and Costa, Perugino and Raphael precede masterpieces by Parmigianino and Titian. The rich seventeenth-century section offers rooms dedicated to the three Carracci and to Guido Reni, Guercino, Domenichino and Tiarini. The tour ends with works from the eighteenth century in Emilia (Crespi, Creti, Gandolfi). Upstairs is the Cabinet of Drawings and Prints, full of thousands of pieces, which can be consulted on request.
