The story
On the north side of the square beneath the Palais des Papes in Avignon, the Petit Palais holds one of France's great gatherings of early Italian painting, gold-ground panels and altarpieces from the 13th to the 16th century. Its best-known picture is a Madonna and Child by Sandro Botticelli, an early work painted around 1467, when the Florentine was in his early twenties. Close by is Vittore Carpaccio's Holy Conversation, in which the Venetian set the Virgin, the Child and saints before a rocky landscape, with hermit saints at their prayers in the distance.
Most of these paintings once belonged to Giampietro Campana, a Roman marquis who built up a vast collection in the 19th century. After his arrest for embezzlement in 1857 the collection was sold off, and Napoleon III bought a large part of it in 1861. The early Italian pictures were later scattered among French museums, and in 1976 many of them were brought back together here on deposit from the Louvre, alongside paintings of the Avignon school from the city's Musée Calvet and sculpture from the papal period.
The building was begun around 1318 as a cardinal's residence, in the decades when the popes lived in Avignon, and later became the bishops' palace. It was damaged while serving as a fortress during the Western Schism, when rival popes competed for the Church, and was rebuilt in the late 15th century. Giuliano della Rovere, the future Pope Julius II, gave it the round windows and the pedimented doorway still seen on its façade.
