The Pinacoteca Nazionale of Bologna is a museum you visit badly if you go through it in order. The rooms follow the chronology, from the thirteenth century to the eighteenth, and in the middle are dozens of very large altarpieces that look a great deal alike: if you do not know what to look for, you come out remembering the tiredness.
If you do know what to look for, in four rooms you find a signed Giotto, the Raphael that changed the history of the sacred figure group, the invention of modern landscape and one of the most unbearable pictures of the Italian seventeenth century, in the best sense of the word.
This article lists the works I would look for. The practical figures are at the end, and the first thing to know is that the museum closes on Monday.
How the museum is made, and what is closed
The Pinacoteca is in via delle Belle Arti, inside the former Jesuit novitiate, next to the Academy of Fine Arts. It was founded in 1762 out of the collection of the Institute of Sciences and grew in the nineteenth century with works from suppressed churches and convents: that is why the collection is almost entirely Emilian and almost entirely religious in subject, and why the altarpieces are enormous. They were not collectors’ pictures, they were altars.
Attention: Palazzo Pepoli Campogrande, the detached seat holding the eighteenth-century section and the Zambeccari collections, has been closed for refurbishment since 1 July 2024 and as of 1 September 2026 has not reopened. If you are looking for the Gandolfi or the eighteenth-century views, they are not on show.
The main route, in via delle Belle Arti, is on the other hand regularly open.
Raphael’s Ecstasy of Saint Cecilia, room 15
It is the work for which the museum exists in the public imagination, and it hangs in room 15, in its place. If you have read elsewhere that it is on loan, check that information again: it spent four months at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and that loan is over.
Raphael painted it for the chapel of Elena Duglioli dall’Olio in San Giovanni in Monte, and critics place the dating around 1514, perhaps a year or two later. It is a panel that does something strange for an altarpiece: it does not narrate an episode.
Saint Cecilia stands at the centre with four saints around her, holding a portative organ that is slipping from her fingers. At her feet, on the ground, lie broken and abandoned musical instruments: a viol with snapped strings, tambourines, flutes. Cecilia’s head is thrown back and she is listening to a choir of angels visible in the sky. The meaning is declared by the objects: earthly music has fallen to the ground because the celestial kind has made it useless.
The thing to look at closely, and the reason it is worth stepping nearer, are the instruments at the bottom. They are painted with a still-life precision that was not normal in 1514, and every surface has a different consistency: the taut skin of the tambourine, the polished wood of the viol, the brass. Vasari already attributed the execution of that group to Giovanni da Udine, the specialist for this kind of detail in Raphael’s workshop; modern criticism has also proposed a hand from Giulio Romano.
Giotto’s Bologna Polyptych, and the signature on the step
In the fourteenth-century rooms hangs the only work by Giotto left in Bologna, and it is also one of the few that carries his name.
The polyptych was painted around 1330 for the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli, and it has five panels: the enthroned Madonna and Child at the centre, and at the sides the archangels Michael and Gabriel with saints Peter and Paul. It is a late work, from the phase in which Giotto had a large workshop and took commissions across half of Italy.
The thing to look for is on the step of the throne, at the bottom centre: there is the inscription OPUS MAGISTRI IOCTI DE FLORENTIA. Giotto’s signed works can be counted on the fingers of one hand, and this is one of them. It is not an artist’s signature in the modern sense: it is the workshop’s guarantee, the mark that told the patron the work came from there.
On the painting itself: the Madonna has the solid volume and heavy drapery that made Giotto what he is, but the gold grounds and the compartmented structure still belong to tradition. It is the work of an innovator operating inside a conservative format, and the tension between the two shows.
I have also written about it in the biography of Giotto, if you are interested in where this polyptych sits in his career.
The Carracci, and the invention of landscape as a subject
In the late sixteenth-century rooms you reach the reason Bologna matters in the history of European painting. In 1582 three cousins, Ludovico, Agostino and Annibale Carracci, opened a school they called the Accademia degli Incamminati, and out of it came the way painting was done in Italy for the following century.
What they did is more radical than it sounds: they drew from life. At a moment when painting had become an exercise in quoting Michelangelo and Raphael, the Carracci put the living model back in the studio and nature back outside the window.
The work to look for, if the history of genres interests you, is Annibale’s River Landscape with a Hunter. It is a canvas in which almost nothing happens: a river, a boat, a man with a dog, and the light of an afternoon on a hillside. In 1600 a picture like that had no market, because landscape was still considered a background. Annibale paints it as if it were the subject, and a hundred and fifty years later the whole of Europe will paint that way.
Guido Reni’s Massacre of the Innocents
Guido Reni has the reputation of the sweet painter, the one with Madonnas whose eyes turn to heaven. This picture, painted around 1611, serves to dismantle it.
The Massacre of the Innocents shows two killers with raised knives and a group of mothers, and Reni makes a precise directorial choice: he freezes the action an instant before the blow. No child has yet been killed in the upper part of the canvas; on the ground lie two, already dead, and the contrast between the two zones does the work. Above, two angels descend with the palms of martyrdom, which is how Counter-Reformation painting declared the theological sense of what you are looking at.
What is disturbing, and it is deliberate, is the beauty. The faces of the screaming mothers are composed according to classical canons, the colours are limpid, the draperies are impeccable. Reni is painting a massacre with the grammar of harmony, and the effect is colder and harder than any realism.
One curiosity: the picture was painted for a chapel in the church of San Domenico in Bologna, and it stayed there for two centuries. It reached the Pinacoteca with the Napoleonic suppressions, which is to say with the same movement that filled this museum.
Lavinia Fontana, the first woman painter with a workshop of her own
There is a name that should be sought out deliberately in Bologna, because art history kept it at the margins for three centuries.
Lavinia Fontana was born in Bologna in 1552, daughter of the painter Prospero, and she was the first woman in Europe to run a professional workshop in her own name, supporting a family of eleven children by painting. She painted portraits for the Bolognese and Roman aristocracy, public altarpieces, and she was called to Rome by Pope Clement VIII.
In the Pinacoteca the most affecting piece is a small painting from the 1580s, a child asleep in a cradle. It is not a public commission and is probably a private portrait, perhaps a funerary one, of one of her children who died in infancy. It is painted with an attention that has nothing celebratory about it.
I have given her life an article of its own: Lavinia Fontana, a painter at the papal court.
Practical information
Figures checked on 1 September 2026 on the official site pinacotecabologna.cultura.gov.it. The domain has changed: the old address pinacotecabologna.beniculturali.it no longer works, so any links to it are out of date.
Tickets. The full ticket costs 12 euros. The reduced ticket costs 2 euros and applies to European Union citizens between 18 and 25. Entry is free under 18, for holders of the Bologna Welcome Card and for members of the Società di Santa Cecilia.
Hours. The museum is open Tuesday to Sunday and on public holidays from 9.00 to 19.00, with last entry half an hour before closing. It is closed on Monday, and that is the constraint that decides when to come: on Monday the Santo Stefano complex closes in Bologna as well.
Free admission. Entry is free for under 18s and free for everyone on the first Sunday of each month.
Getting there. Via delle Belle Arti 56, in the university quarter, a ten-minute walk from piazza Maggiore and fifteen from the central station. The whole route from the station is arcaded.
How long. The main route needs at least two hours. If only the five works in this article interest you, an hour and a half is enough.
A flaw, in fairness. The museum is large and the succession of altarpieces is tiring: without a plan you reach the seventeenth-century rooms already worn out, and the Carracci and Reni are at the end. If you are short of time, start from the end and work back.
On queues. There are none. The Pinacoteca is one of those great Italian museums you always walk straight into, and that is why you will find no links to bookable tickets in this article: they are not needed.
If you are building a wider itinerary, the Pinacoteca is the first day’s stop in What to see in Bologna in 2 days. For the other great art stop in the centre, where sculpture stands instead of painting, there is the Lamentation by Niccolò dell’Arca, and for architecture there is the basilica of San Petronio.
Photo credits: Ecstasy of Saint Cecilia, Giotto’s polyptych and Child in a cradle by MarkPagl and Mongolo1984, the Carracci room by Nicola Quirico, River Landscape by Annibale Carracci (CC BY-SA 4.0); Massacre of the Innocents by Guido Reni, public domain reproduction. All from Wikimedia Commons.
