Allegory of the Five Senses

In 1686 an inventory of the Barberini collection described a long picture with several portraits, one playing, one singing, one gambling, one drinking and one cheating his companion, by the hand of Mattia the Calabrian. This is that canvas, more than three and a half metres wide, painted in the early to mid-1640s. It looks like a crowded tavern given over to music, wine and cards, each group standing for one of the five senses. At the right, though, someone looks out and takes no part. The museum identifies him as the ancient philosopher Democritus, who laughed at the world, with Heraclitus, who wept at it, behind him, a reminder to watch life's follies from a distance. Democritus shows the five fingers of his open hand. For years the picture hung in the rooms of the armed forces officers' club, which has its seat in the palace, and it passed to the gallery in 2016. A restoration for an exhibition in 2019 confirmed what the scholar Maurizio Marini had proposed in 2003, that two painters worked on it. The curator Yuri Primarosa gave the central figures, among them a self-portrait standing for sight, to Mattia's elder brother Gregorio, in whose Roman workshop Mattia trained, and most of the figures at the sides to Mattia himself. The museum's own record lists the picture under Mattia's name.