The itinerary does not open, however, with a 16th-century work: visitors are welcomed by a 14th century Holy Head, attributed orally by Federico Zeri to Giovanni da Rimini, one of the main Giotto figures in northern Italy. It is a fragment of a larger work, and has not yet been thoroughly studied: for the moment, it is preferable to refer to a more general Adriatic area. The small portion of the table is only one of the many discoveries of Devanna. Among the many that stand out, for example, a Nativity referred to Pietro Negroni called the Zingarelli (Cosenza, 1505? - Naples, 1567), enigmatic artist near Polidoro da Caravaggio, who probably knew in Messina, where both painters were in the fourth decade of the sixteenth century, but also shows a certain knowledge of other painters in the northern area (such as Giulio Romano and Pellegrino Tibaldi). The particularity of this painting lies in the fact that the usual iconography is reversed: usually, it is the Virgin who discovers the Child Jesus, while here the exact opposite happens, with the veil being lifted by St. Joseph.
The work dates back to about 1560 (the dating was suggested by the scholar Sylvie Béguin, who related the panel with the altarpiece depicting the Madonna and Child and Saints Andrew and James, signed and dated 1555 by Negroni: was probably made for the church of the cross of Lucca in Naples and is now at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Orléans), a time when in the South (and not only) the cult of St. Joseph experienced a certain popularity: it is, therefore, conceivable that the commissioner of the work, a devotee of the putative father of Christ, wanted for this reason to give this unusual role to St. Joseph.
- Also to remain in the field of 16th century art, one of the most discussed paintings in the collection is the Portrait of a Monk (or Portrait of a Friar with a White Saio), an unusual portrait of a Dominican Friar which in 1999 was first reported, by the scholar Maurizio Marini, to El Greco (Domínikos Theotokópoulos; Candia, 1541 - Toledo, 1614): an attribution also supported by another important art historian (and one of El Greco's leading specialists), Lionello Puppi, around whom the debate has recently reopened.
One of the symbolic works of the Galleria Nazionale Della Puglia is a painting by Giovanni Lanfranco (Parma, 1582 - Rome, 1647), the Farewell of Christ by his mother, published for the first time in 1995 by Emilio Negro, who made it known. The history of this important canvas, which emerged in the Roman antique market in 1970, is not known: we can only assume that it is a work whose commission matured in Franciscan environments, where the unusual iconography was widespread apocryphal moment when Christ says goodbye to his mother before leaving for Jerusalem on the eve of the week of the Passion.
In this painting, where the main group (the one with Christ kneeling, the Mother blessing him, and St. John standing watching the scene), follows in an almost literal way the work of the same subject that Correggio (Antonio Allegri; Correggio, circa 1489 - 1534), a fellow countryman from Lanfranco, painted around 1517 and which is now in the National Gallery in London, the composition is particularly crowded, with the characters, distinguished by their pale colours, arranged along the two diagonals of the painting in an almost symmetrical manner: the ways (the tonalities, the features of the characters, the drapery) found in other paintings made between the 10's and '20s of the seventeenth century, have led scholars to date the work to about 1620.
Another much-debated work is a splendid Christ mocked dating from the mid-seventeenth century: variously attributed to the Genoese Luciano Borzone (Genoa, 1590 - 1645), was more recently brought back to the hand of the Sienese Bernardino Mei (Siena, 1612 - Rome, 1676). There is also room for a great local artist, Giuseppe De Nittis (Barletta, 1846 - Saint-Germain-en-Laye, 1884): in the Devanna collection, there is a view of Trafalgar Square painted when the artist, in 1878, stayed for some time in London painting different views of the English capital. The painting, signed, should be part of a series of views of London that the "Italian impressionist" painted that year for the English banker Kaye Knowles and which today are divided between various collections: that of Bitonto is distinguished by its unusual vertical cut, as if the artist painted traveling through the city with a carriage and looking out the window. Devanna's interest in twentieth-century art is exemplified above all by American paintings, which fully reflect Girolamo Devanna's interests: among these are the drawings by Beatrice Wood (San Francisco, 1893 - Ojai, 1998), such as Situation, a 1925 pencil and watercolour work that proposes some of the typical elements of the graphic work of the American painter and ceramist, such as the smoky atmosphere, the simplified forms, the characters with elusive faces.
The works, as mentioned, are divided into rooms corresponding to different centuries. In addition to the works mentioned above, the sixteenth-century rooms house a Portrait of a Gentleman attributed to Titian, and works by important artists who worked in the South during the sixteenth century, starting with Leonardo Corona and Giovanni Filippo Criscuolo, but there are also artists representing other regional schools: for example, in the collection figure a work attributed to the Sienese Marco Pino, there are works by the Marche Vincenzo Pagani, and there is also a painting by Milanese Giovanni Ambrogio Figino. For the seventeenth century, ranging from Giovanni Baglione to Jan Miel (both are self-portraits), from Nicolas Poussin to Simon Vouet, and even in this case is well represented the southern painting with Andrea Vaccaro, Cesare Fracanzano, Francesco Antonio Altobello (the latter, however, originally from Bitonto).
There are also works attributed to Orazio Gentileschi and Salvator Rosa. The eighteenth century section is very rich: there are two important works (a San Paolo and a San Vincenzo Ferrer) by Francesco De Mura, there are paintings by Corrado Giaquinto, Sebastiano Conca (and his nephew, Tommaso Maria Conca), Francesco Trevisani, Pietro Fabris, Camillo De Vito. Foreign painting is represented by William Hamilton, Thomas Lawrence, François-Xavier Fabre, and there is also a King Lear of one of the fathers of Romanticism, the Swiss Johann-Heinrich Füssli. The mature romanticism is represented, in the rooms of the nineteenth century, by Eugène Delacroix, and for the Italian painting of the nineteenth century, in addition to the already mentioned De Nittis, there are works by Domenico Morelli, Francesco Saverio Altamura, Giuseppe Carelli, Gabriele Smargiassi, Giuseppe Casciaro and more. The tour ends with the art of the twentieth century, where the works of Emilio Notte, Beatrice Wood, and Joseph Stella stand out.
Today, the National Gallery of Puglia is a museum that attracts every year about twenty thousand visitors: 2018, in particular, was the record year, with the figure of 21,586, constantly increasing compared to previous years, and there are further margins for growth, since the museum is one of the richest collections in Puglia. The State, declared Girolamo Devanna, seemed to him and his sister "the most reassuring structure for the preservation of the collection and for its development in the context of a model not merely linked to localization schemes, which could represent an extension of the cultural boundaries of our region. A precious heritage that has thus become the heritage of all Italian citizens, who will always be grateful to the munificence of the Devanna brothers.