Palazzo Pepoli Campogrande: A Baroque Palace and Art-Museum Branch in Bologna
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 4.5
- Popularity
- Low
- Country
- Italy
- Primary era
- Early Modern
- External website
- Open
- Eras represented
- Early Modern
- Civilizations
- Papal States
- Site type
- Domestic
- Remains
- Palace
On this page14 sections
History
Palazzo Pepoli Campogrande is a seventeenth-century Baroque palace in Bologna, Italy, built as a residence for the Pepoli family and now housing a branch of the Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna. Also called Palazzo Pepoli Nuovo, it stands opposite Palazzo Pepoli Vecchio in central Bologna and preserves a decorative program devoted to the family’s rise from powerful bankers in the fourteenth century to lords of the city.
Construction under the Pepoli family
Count Odoardo Pepoli commissioned the palace after receiving the senatorial title in 1653. Following his death in 1680, construction resumed in 1683 under his nephew Ercole Pepoli. After Ercole died in 1707, Alessandro Pepoli continued the work. Giovanni Battista Albertoni designed the facade on Via Castiglione and probably established the overall design, while Giuseppe Antonio Torri completed the facade on Via Clavature in 1709.
The palace’s decoration gave the family’s political history a ceremonial setting. Taddeo Pepoli, a fourteenth-century member of the family who became lord of Bologna, appears in the grand-staircase decoration, while Hercules, Alexander the Great, and allegorical figures provided subjects for later rooms. These themes connected the family’s ambitions with established stories of authority, virtue, and heroic achievement.
Collections and later use
The Campogrande family later acquired the palace. In the 1970s, Edvige Campogrande donated the piano nobile, the principal ceremonial or residential floor of an Italian palace, to the Municipality of Bologna. The building now accommodates a branch of the Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna, a state-run museum specializing in painting associated especially with Bologna and Emilia-Romagna, as well as the photographic archive of the Superintendency for Historical, Artistic, and Ethno-anthropological Heritage, known as SBSAE.
Part of the Zambeccari collection is displayed in the palace. The collection was assembled and preserved by the senatorial Zambeccari family in its own palace, designated for public use in 1788 through the initiative of Giacomo Zambeccari, and transferred to the Pinacoteca’s holdings in 1884. It contains more than 300 paintings, chiefly from the Emilian school but also from elsewhere in Italy and Flanders. It is described as the Bolognese aristocratic collection that survived almost intact. Palazzo Pepoli Campogrande also holds cultural-property status in Italy.
Remains
Palazzo Pepoli Campogrande is organized around facades on Via Castiglione and Via Clavature, an ornamented entrance, formal circulation spaces, and a sequence of decorated rooms on the principal floor. Its surviving interiors combine stucco, fresco painting, illusionistic architectural settings, and allegorical subjects within the Italian Baroque tradition of monumental decoration.
Entrance and circulation
Portal and entrance hall
Entry is through a portal enriched with rustication, a masonry treatment that gives the surface a deliberately rough, block-like appearance. Beyond it lies the entrance hall, dated to 1690. The hall and the nearby grand staircase are probably works by Gian Giacomo Monti, forming the principal approach to the palace’s ceremonial rooms.
Grand staircase
The grand staircase dates from about 1664. Two oval stucco panels made by Domenico Maria Canuti in 1665 depict episodes from the history of Taddeo Pepoli, whose career as lord of Bologna represented the political ascent celebrated throughout the palace’s decoration.
Frescoed ceremonial rooms
Principal salon
Between 1669 and 1671, Domenico Maria Canuti painted the fresco Apotheosis of Hercules in Olympus on the vault of the principal salon. Domenico Santi, known as Il Mengazzino, collaborated on the work by creating the painted architectural settings that frame and extend the room through illusionistic perspective.
Sala di Felsina
The adjacent Sala di Felsina was decorated in 1690 by the Rolli brothers. Giuseppe Rolli painted the figures, while Antonio Rolli, a quadraturista specializing in painted architectural illusion, created the fictive architectural framework. The room takes its name from the fresco Triumph of Felsina, using Felsina, an ancient name associated with Bologna, as part of its historical imagery.
Sala delle Stagioni
In the Sala delle Stagioni, Giuseppe Maria Crespi painted the ceiling scene Triumph of Hercules. Personifications of the four seasons surround the central subject, extending the room’s allegorical program through the imagery of the annual cycle.
Sala dell’Olimpo
Giuseppe Maria Crespi later frescoed the ceiling of the Sala dell’Olimpo. The room belongs to the palace’s sequence of mythological and allegorical interiors, in which ceiling painting supplied the principal decorative focus.
Sala di Alessandro
Alessandro Pepoli commissioned the Sala di Alessandro in 1710. Donato Creti decorated it with a painting of Alexander the Great cutting the Gordian Knot, a subject that continued the palace’s interest in heroic figures and acts of decisive authority.
Zambeccari paintings
Rooms in the palace display a portion of the Zambeccari collection, an aristocratic quadreria, meaning an organized collection of paintings historically associated with a noble residence. Artists represented include Giuseppe Maria Crespi, Donato Creti, Titian, Ludovico Carracci, Guercino, and Jacopo Palma the Younger. These works occupy the palace alongside its original frescoes and stucco decoration, linking the building’s residential history with its later museum function.
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