National Gallery of Ireland
Neoclassical museum of European masterworks, including a Caravaggio once lost for a century.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin starts in a Jesuit dining room on Leeson Street, where priests ate lunch for sixty years beneath a dark, unremarkable painting they knew only as a minor Dutch work. It traces the canvas back to Marie Lea-Wilson, widow of a murdered Royal Irish Constabulary officer, who gave it to the Jesuits out of gratitude, and forward to 1990, when a National Gallery conservator named Sergio Benedetti examined it and saw something else beneath the grime. Benedetti spent the next three years chasing proof through Roman archives, including the original payment record for a work commissioned by the Mattei family in 1602.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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