That the storerooms of museums and superintendencies are treasure chests is, all things considered, a well-known fact. That Palazzo Montecitorio, where the Chamber of Deputies is housed, is crammed with works of art is, all things considered, equally well known. Less well known is that several hundred cultural goods that are inside the Chamber of Deputies are there in “temporary storage,” many for nearly a hundred years.
The Chamber’s art holdings come up again and again periodically, often chaotically and misleadingly, for example when some party complains that some politician keeps a given work in his office. But the Chamber permanently houses more than 3,000 drawings, prints, engravings, lithographs, and watercolors, many purchased from the 1930s onward, others brought in during the renovations of the Palace overseen by Ernesto Basile in the early part of the twentieth century.
About a thousand, the Chamber’s offices explain, are paintings, half of them owned by the Chamber of Deputies, purchased in particular in the 1960s (when an ad hoc commission was set up within the Bureau, with the intention of promoting contemporary art of the twentieth century, which was absent from the deposits until then present in the Palace) and in the 1990s, with the Chamber’s participation, as buyer, in the Rome Quadriennale and the Venice Biennale. Since then, no further acquisitions have been made, except for a free loan of Ceroli’s work, the Quinto Stato, which - precisely - the Chamber of Deputies does not own. These are, of course, not only restricted artworks, but also paintings “probably not of great value, but nevertheless part of the collection,” the Montecitorio offices explain.
Of these 3,000 works, just over 800 of the most significant are digitized and also available to the public online, at the website arte.camera.it. And several hundred, as anticipated, have been in “temporary storage” since 1926 or 1927: they are the largest share of those that arrived in Rome from all the then Superintendencies of Italy, to furnish and fill a palace at the time that had just been renovated. Of the 825 published, only 309 are owned by the Chamber. Not only busts, or representations having to do with the Unification of Italy (battles, symbolic places, Andrea Appiani’s portrait of Napoleon...) but also allegories of the most varied kind, and copies of some famous paintings, such as a Mona Lisa from the Brera collections.
With the various ministerial reforms that have taken place over decades, today these works are owned by a plethora of different museums. 181 are owned by the Uffizi Galleries, 119 come from Capodimonte, 46 from Brera and the National Galleries of Rome (Barberini-Corsini). For the most part, these are not masterpieces, but works that “at home” would probably be destined for storage. The last major initiative to return them to their original institutions is dated 2001, in a commission chaired by then-deputy Vittorio Sgarbi. “Paintings by Tintoretto and Luca Giordano were brought back,” Sgarbi explained 20 years later. “And in return the museums, as compensation, donated to Montecitorio paintings that they had in storage and did not display. Maybe because they were large, like the Risorgimento ones in the Palazzo Pitti, Uffizi and Capodimonte.”
Actually, a few paintings by Luca Giordano (attributed) remained in Montecitorio, but mostly these 500 or so paintings and drawings (450 of them in the public platform) that have been there since 1926-1927. There are among them paintings by Andrea Schiavone, Francesco De Mura, Domenico Ferri, by Padovanino and many others, as well as copies and workshop works. The Chamber’s offices explain that there is an ongoing discussion about the goods on deposit, many of which have been - at the request of the owners - returned over time. Most recently, last September, to Palazzo Barberini, which provided for the restoration and display in the museum of a work by Jacopino del Conte. And again, a memorandum of understanding was signed last December 4 between the Chamber and MIC, aimed at further enhancing the artistic heritage with a new season of exchanges of existing deposits.
The arte.camera portal, which opened in 2021, is an important advancement for public knowledge of the holdings located in Montecitorio, although it concerns to date a minority of the assets stored there. In the absence of official cataloging, explain from Montecitorio, we have settled on making public and usable the works of property present in the two official catalogs that exist to date, one from 1993 (Trombadori and Rivosecchi) and one from 2006 (Pirovano), enriching the online files with the relevant explanations in the catalogs. In the meantime, together with the Special Superintendence of Rome and the Institute for the Catalogue (ICCD), the cataloguing criterion was identified as the “collection of the Chamber of Deputies,” and at the end of last year, the operation of reconnaissance and classification of 500 paintings was completed.
Today, in the Aldo Moro Room, the Chamber exhibits thematic selections of artworks in its premises on a rotating basis. The Chamber also reports that, as of October 2020, it has been equipped, following appropriate plant adaptations to ensure in particular the best hygrometric conditions of the room, with a space to give way to restoration and conservation work on artistic goods. This allows for more timely supervision of the various stages of the work, as well as a reduction in the costs of handling and insuring the works. In parallel, the most recent interventions on the assets are documented on that site, through a set of texts, photos and videos.
Insights are also made possible thanks to the Museums that own the paintings on deposit, which have enthusiastically joined the spirit of the initiative. Their collaboration has, therefore, not been limited to the institutional activity of supervision in the execution of the work, but has led to the preparation of descriptive sheets that, balancing the technical aspect with the informative one, tell the restoration and the history of the work, explains the staff of Montecitorio. All the assets catalogued (and to date more than can be found on the portal) can be consulted on the online Catalog of National Cultural Assets, the platform called SIGECWeb. Just in these weeks, they explain from Montecitorio, the integration of the property assets not yet present on the Chamber’s website, but catalogued by the Superintendence, is being carried out. The operation, presumably, will be completed during November-December 2025.
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