The story
In January 1904 a fire swept through Turin's national library and destroyed half of a famous book of hours, a prayer book begun for the French prince Jean de Berry. Its finest pages are credited to an artist scholars call Hand G, perhaps Jan van Eyck himself or someone very close to him. The other half had stayed in Milan with the princely Trivulzio family. In 1935 a group of Trivulzio treasures passed to Turin's civic museum, and those surviving leaves came here, to Palazzo Madama. Among them is a tiny Birth of John the Baptist, a Flemish bedroom scene painted around 1420.
The same arrangement brought Antonello da Messina's portrait of an unknown man, signed and dated 1476 and now called the Trivulzio Portrait after the family that owned it. He looks straight out against a dark ground with a faint, knowing smile.
The building deserves a visit for its own sake. Its core is a gate of Roman Turin, later wrapped into a medieval castle. In the 17th century two regent duchesses of Savoy, each called Madama Reale, lived here and gave the palace its name. Around 1720 the court architect Filippo Juvarra added the Baroque front and its grand staircase, and in 1861 the first Senate of united Italy met inside. The museum fills four floors, with medieval stone in the basement, Gothic and Renaissance painting on the first floor, Baroque rooms above and decorative arts at the top.
