Resumen de La collezione dell'avvocato Giuseppe Valletta (1636-1714) tra le carte dell'Archivio Orsini
The collection of the lawyer Giuseppe Valletta (1636–1714) among the documents of the Orsini archives.
The lawyer Giuseppe Valletta was a prominent intellectual in late seventeenth–century Naples, and a collector of books, medals, coins, Apulian vases, drawn and engraved portraits, paintings, and ancient sculptures, whose estate was dispersed by his heirs over the first half of the eighteenth century. A study of Valletta’s estate inventory, identified in the Orsini archive in Rome, permits the author to propose new attributions for several works of art formerly kept in his house situated near Palazzo Gravina, including the terracotta ‘Portrait of Gian Lorenzo Bernini’ (St. Petersburg, Hermitage), paintings by important Dutch and Flemish artists such as Jan Lievens, Michaelina Wouthers and Abraham Brueghel, and fine examples of Neapolitan painting such as ‘The Elderberry Branch’ by Andrea Belvedere (Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte). It has also been possible to highlight the innovation represented by the arrangement of Valletta’s collection for display in the Neapolitan context, into which he imported the Roman taste for rooms decorated with large painted mirrors of the kind found in the Borghese and Colonna palaces.
