Giuseppe Maria Soli in palazzo Barberini a Roma

The inventory of goods owned by Prince Giulio Cesare Colonna di Sciarra, who had married Cornelia Costanza Barberini in 1728, contains a reference to Giuseppe Maria Soli as the author of a canvas in the alcove of the second-floor apartment in the Palazzo Barberini in Rome. This makes it possible to reconstruct Soli’s hitherto unpublished activity there, and he is credited with the authorship of the six canvases in the salone of the apartment and the decoration of the gabinetto dei ritratti. Bearing in mind that Soli was in Rome between 1770 and 1784, and that scholarship indicates that work on the palazzo was completed by 1770, a new chronology is put forward – the 1770s – thus also providing a context for the precocious taste in Neoclassicism which has been recognised here, precisely in the decoration of the gabinetto.