The story
For years the painting at the heart of this museum carried the wrong name. The Banca Commerciale Italiana bought it in the early 1970s as a work by Mattia Preti, a Calabrian painter of the generation after Caravaggio. In 1980 the scholar Vincenzo Pacelli found letters in the archive of the Doria family showing that Caravaggio had painted it in Naples in 1610 for the Genoese nobleman Marcantonio Doria. It is the Martyrdom of Saint Ursula, considered his last canvas, finished about two months before he died.
Since May 2022 it has hung on Via Toledo, the main street of Naples, in the former head office of the Banco di Napoli, a stone-clad bank designed by the architect Marcello Piacentini in the late 1930s. Intesa Sanpaolo, the banking group that owns the collection, had the old banking halls converted by the Milanese architect Michele De Lucchi and moved its Naples gallery here from Palazzo Zevallos Stigliano, a few doors along the same street.
The painting route continues through Naples in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. Louis Finson, a Flemish painter who shared a studio with Caravaggio in the city, is here with a Judith beheading Holofernes, and Artemisia Gentileschi with a Samson and Delilah. Another floor shows more than 500 vases from Attica and the Greek cities of southern Italy, known as the Caputi collection, and the 20th century arrives with Lucio Fontana and Alberto Burri.
