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From the imperial galleries of Vienna to the heart of Rome: a journey through masterpieces that reveal the cultural ambitions of the Habsburg dynasty. Palazzo Cipolla hosts a project that brings together, for the first time in Italy, more than fifty works from the collections of the renowned Vienna museum. The exhibition offers a privileged glimpse into one of Europe’s most extraordinary artistic collections, assembled between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries and conceived as a true dynastic self-portrait. Paintings, precious objects, and works from the historic Kunstkammer evoke the image of a multiethnic empire that used art as a means of representation, knowledge, and dialogue between cultures. At the heart of the exhibition is European painting from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Masterpieces by Rubens, Van Dyck, and Jan Brueghel the Elder evoke the vitality of the Flemish school, while the Dutch tradition reflects the emergence of a new bourgeois sensibility attentive to everyday life and the observation of reality. These are joined by refined cabinet paintings and still lifes once destined for the private collections of European courts. The dialogue between Northern and Southern Europe emerges powerfully in the section devoted to Italian painting, with works by Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, and Orazio Gentileschi, culminating in one of the most intense moments of the exhibition: Caravaggio’s Crowning with Thorns, a masterpiece that transforms a sacred episode into a deeply human drama of extraordinary emotional force. More than a display of masterpieces, the exhibition tells the story of a great museum and of imperial collecting as a force in shaping a shared European cultural imagination - a dialogue between Vienna and Rome that spans centuries of history, art, and ideas.