The large wall drawing executed by the English artist David Tremlett, in a rear-view room on the noble floor of Palazzo Butera, at the end of 2018. Starting from the 1980s, Tremlett's pastel wall drawings become the artist's main expressive means: large geometric designs made on architectural surfaces. In his works, of environmental proportions, the pigment is spread directly with the hands on the walls. At Palazzo Butera Tremlett confronts the eighteenth-century frescoes by Fumagalli and Martorana and reinterprets the theme of squaring and perspective breakthrough in a contemporary key.

Antonio Corradini (1668-1752) is famous above all for his veiled sculptures, such as the Dead Christ in the Chapel of San Severo in Naples, made by Giuseppe Sammartino on a sketch by Corradini. The Venetian sculptor has a full-fledged European career: his works are scattered across Corfu, Lisbon and Vienna. The mirrors from the Valsecchi Collection were exhibited at the Fitzwilliam Museum from 2016 to 2018 and are now on display on the first floor of Palazzo Butera. The head and the characters with trumpets evoke a Goldonian carnival atmosphere, while references to the world of chinoiserie, such as the pagoda, are flanked by classical motifs, such as pilasters, or Rococo.

A bronze eye that supports itself on its own tear: from the center of the pupil the fluid descends to the floor where it forms a support base. In the root room of Palazzo Butera, this work almost seems to radiate the majolica-clad canal where the Jacaranda root has been inserted. During their artistic career, Anne and Patrick Poirier have developed a poetics based on the fragility of human memory. Celebrated by recent retrospectives (Paris, Maison Européenne de la Photographie, 2017; Rome, Villa Medici, 2018), the Poirier path crossed archeology and Renaissance gardens. The possible destruction of civilizations, due to wars, has become a fixed point of their gaze. And the weeping eye is the place where time is imprinted and becomes memory.

In November 1850, Augustus Pugin (1812-1852) was fully engaged in the designs for the new English Parliament in Westminster. For at least six years, there have been rumors about who is the true soul of the project, between the two architects, whether the famous Charles Barry (1795-1860) or his young assistant, Pugin, who already in 1845 had felt the need to publicly declare his subordination to Mr. Barry. Pugin's drawing for these chairs, which is kept at the Victoria & Albert Museum (E.1501-1912), is accompanied by numerous indications for the cabinet-maker John Gregory Crace, who in all probability carried out the project scrupulously. The chairs are designed for the House of Commons, as Pugin explains in the text: “Mr. Barry wants a Pattern Chair for the Commons lobbies. His idea is a light but strong chamfered chair like the above sketch covered with green leather ". The death of Pugin at the age of forty will ensure that the chairs of the House of Commons are among his last works. His all-encompassing approach to design, inspired by Gothic designs and principles, will be a central starting point for nineteenth-century English design and modernity.

These two girandoles were made by a great goldsmith to a design by Giocondo Albertolli, a Ticino architect who enjoyed unparalleled success in neoclassical Milan. The design for these girandoles was published in 1787 in the volume Some Decorations of Nobili Sale and other Ornaments and attests that they were intended for the side frames of a mirror in the Caryatids room of Palazzo Reale in Milan, badly damaged during the Second World War. A few years earlier, Albertolli had worked with Luigi Valadier, for the bronzes to be made at Palazzo Greppi, and the possibility that the creator of these furnishings is precisely the Roman goldsmith cannot be ruled out.

Imago is a work in seven parts. The matrix - a thin and light plywood board - is engraved to accommodate a mixture of vinavil and vaseline, which is then imprinted six times on the other white squares. In a critical text of 1997, Ferretti wrote, on Imago: «Elaboration conceived, perhaps the only case, in relation to the space in which the seven works would be found. Uniqueness of the message (or of the referent) and complexity of the solutions in the continuous variation of the identical. The word that becomes an image and in reflection leads back to what is in front of it, to the thought of the beholder ». Imago was exhibited for the first time in 1997, in the Massimo Valsecchi gallery in Milan. The matrix was exposed in the back wall and the six canvases were arranged going from the most legible to those where the word loses its material relief. Since April 2019, Imago has been exhibited on a single wall, in a large gallery on the ground floor of Palazzo Butera.

The collaboration between Viviano Codazzi from Bergamo, a specialist in ruins who probably arrived in Naples in 1634, and the figure painter Domenico Gargiulo enjoyed a certain success, so much so that it was mentioned in the most accredited source on Neapolitan painting of the seventeenth century, such as the Lives of Bernardo De Dominici. The Valsecchi painting represents a gladiatorial combat. The spectators are arranged in two arcades, inspired by the architecture of ancient Rome, interpreted according to already baroque indications. The back building, on the other hand, is reminiscent of the Pantheon, but the most interesting aspect of the painting is the background landscape, almost a painting within a painting, linked to Poussin's Roman painting.

Nella Cavallerizza di Palazzo Butera, è esposto un dipinto di Tom Phillips, "Berlin Wall with German Grass and Skyes, II", del 1973. Si tratta di un quadro politico: il Muro di Berlino esisteva da dodici anni, ma all'epoca non circolavano immagini della barricata che divideva la città. Le cartoline tedesche di allora, sia ad Est che ad Ovest, mostravano invece prati e cieli azzurri. "The day after I got married the East Germans built a wall through Berlin, using pre-cast concrete slabs that were to have been the sides of workers' flats. I first saw the wall in 1971, ten years later, and went specially again to see it last December before starting work on the pictures. No popularly available images exist of the East German side and my painting therefore only shows fragments of the structure seen from the West (as is after all appropriate): the other side is not in any case 'The Berlin Wall' but 'the anti-fascist defensive wall' (now more warmly described as 'the state frontier of the DDR in Berlin'). Grass and sky however occur freely on postcards produced both in West and East Germany. Some places have associations: e.g. one of the sections shows grass from Goethe's garden brought from East Germany, in postcard form, by my wife). [..]. Apart from obvious ironies I am not quite sure how the picture now relates to the wall, its source. It certainly represents the way I see and understand that phenomenon." Tom Phillips. Works Texts to 1974.

During the restoration work on the building, the root of the large Jacaranda in the courtyard was discovered, grown in a drainage channel for rainwater, covered with 18th and 19th century majolica. Over the years, the root has branched out into the canal in search of water. Its growth is a proof of plant intelligence: the root becomes thinner where it does not find water and grows in the direction of the well.

Frans Floris' work is among the most enigmatic in the Valsecchi collection. The panel is painted on both sides: on the side that was intended to be seen, the Flemish painter self-portrayed himself together with William Key, a fellow student of the Académie Lombard in Liège and three Roman emperors: Titus, Caio and Vitellius. However, the five men are also "connoisseurs" of antiquity: they open a box containing fragments of Roman sculptures, such as the Medici Venus or the Horse's Head. A mechanism still existing in the frame allowed to turn the table and see the back: here a Battle of the elderly seems inspired by the prints taken from the frescoes by Rosso Fiorentino in Fontainebleau. Floris had been in Rome in 1535 and in Liège, under the leadership of Lambert Lombard, he was the most promising of the Flemish 'young rebels' who believed in a renewal of painting on the basis of exchanges with the ancient. This remote dialogue with the Roman world, in which ancient and contemporary happily overlap, is now exhibited in the library of Palazzo Butera, in an installation designed by Giovanni Cappelletti that allows you to see both sides of the work.