Family tree of the Pignatelli Aragona family

The memory of a family.

The Family tree of the Pignatelli Aragona family is a painting of considerable size (300×160 cm) from the middle of the 19th century, kept at the Museo Diego Aragona Pignatelli Cortes, better known as Villa Pignatelli.

The restoration, strongly desired by Prince Marzio Pignatelli and by Friends of Naples, aims to recover the work and return it to the city, repositioning it in the ticket-office area at the entrance to the museum.

The painting, executed by Giuseppe Del Rosso and signed and dated in the lower left area, is of fine workmanship.

The composition develops vertically: in the central foreground stands the tree, with its lateral branches filling and balancing the compositional scheme. The broad field of blue sky lends luminosity to the work. In the lower register a landscape with figures is depicted. The personages represented underline the lustre and importance of the Pignatelli family. In the middle zone on the left, the cartouche of the Spinazzola branch, with the figure of Pope Innocent, stands out.

The fine pictorial quality is visible in the attention to detail, as in the details of the coat of arms and in the rendering of the figures.

The technique of the painting is egg tempera on canvas, as revealed by the stratigraphic analyses.

The visual perception of the work was completely distorted by a substantial layer of dirt consisting of loose deposits, dust, oxidised varnishes and glues, which altered the original colour and the material texture, giving the entire surface a dull and arid appearance.

Studio ERMES di Iriana Suprina Petrovic – which carried out the restoration – found the work in a very advanced state of deterioration, and the intervention was therefore particularly demanding; some conservation operations, such as the relining, were carried out in collaboration with Matteo Rossi Doria of CBC.

The restoration intervention was assisted by the support of diagnostic investigations, carried out by the firm Emmebi Diagnostica Artistica of Rome, which made it possible to acquire interesting information on the technique and constituent materials of the work.