The National Galleries of Ancient Art present from 11 October 2019 to 6 January 2020, in the headquarters of Palazzo Barberini, the exhibition "Michelangelo in color. Marcello Venusti, Lelio Orsi, Marco Pino, Jacopino del Conte", curated by Francesca Parrilla and Massimo Pirondini, scientific coordination Yuri Primarosa.
The exhibition presents a small but precious nucleus of works that attest to the fruitful dialogue between Michelangelo and his followers. Playing on the double representation of the main sacred themes treated by Buonarroti and promptly taken up by different painters, it will be possible to grasp the close link between the works on display, compared for the first time, and the drawings of the great Tuscan artist, exhibited in reproduction.

The first focus will revolve around the Annunciation by Lelio Orsi, coming from the Gonzaga museum in Novellara, in the past attributed to Marcello Venusti. The panel, characterized by an exciting history of collecting (it had several owners from Cardinal Alessandro D'Este to the famous collector Sebastiano Resta, up to the Duke of Marlborough John Churchill) will be combined with the Annunciation by Venusti in the Corsini Gallery, considered one of the most important evidence of the lost altarpiece that the Lombard painter had painted - starting from a drawing by Michelangelo - for the Cesi chapel of Santa Maria della Pace.

Also from a drawing by Michelangelo, now preserved in the Uffizi, the two tables of the Oration in the vegetable garden of Venusti, made in different periods, are taken. Translating into painting the drawings that Buonarroti granted him or obtained through Tommaso de 'Cavalieri - a companion of Michelangelo - Venusti soon gained a wide consensus, testified by the presence of his paintings in the main aristocratic collections of the peninsula and in the chapels nobility of numerous Roman churches (Santa Maria Sopra Minerva and Santa Maria della Pace, just to name a few).

Lashed by counter-reform currents, the Crucifixion theme enjoyed unparalleled fortune. Venusti's composition is the result of the union of three important drawings by Michelangelo: the living Christ on the cross , now in the British Museum in London, made for the Marquise Vittoria Colonna, and the two mystically inspired sheets depicting the Madonna and St. Sorrowful John at the foot of the cross , preserved in the Louvre Museum in Paris.