ROME.- What happens to a painting when the artist puts down the brush before it is finished? Beginning today, visitors to the Capitoline Museums are invited to step inside that question with the opening of The unfinished: between poetics and execution technique, a new exhibition at the Pinacoteca Capitolina that sheds light on the hidden lives of unfinished masterpieces.

Open through April 12, the exhibition explores works left incomplete not as failures or interruptions, but as vivid records of artistic thinking in motion. Using advanced, non-invasive diagnostic technologies—normally reserved for conservation and restoration—the show reveals what the naked eye cannot see: revisions, second thoughts, structural changes, and technical decisions embedded beneath the painted surface.

Curated by Costanza Barbieri and Claudio Seccaroni, the project offers a rare opportunity to follow the creative process step by step, as if standing beside the artist while the work is still unfolding. Infrared reflectography, X-rays, spectroscopy, and digital imaging uncover underdrawings, erased figures, altered gestures, and abandoned compositional ideas—turning unfinished paintings into visual narratives of artistic experimentation.

Rather than centering on destruction or absence, the exhibition focuses on presence: the presence of doubt, adjustment, and imagination. Visitors encounter works by Benvenuto Tisi (Il Garofalo), Jacopo Palma il Vecchio, and Guido Reni, whose unfinished paintings reveal a surprisingly modern way of thinking about art as an open, evolving process.

One of the exhibition’s most compelling moments comes in the analysis of Palma il Vecchio’s Christ and the Adulteress, a work that was left unfinished at the artist’s death and later repainted to alter its meaning. Digital diagnostics reveal how Christ’s hand, the woman’s gaze, and even her hair were rethought and reworked, leaving behind a layered record of intention and revision.

An entire gallery is devoted to Guido Reni, whose unfinished works form the largest such group in the Pinacoteca’s collection. Here, visitors can trace how figures shift in posture, wings move, drapery evolves, and entire compositions are rebalanced mid-process. In an exceptional case, Reni’s Blessed Soul is shown alongside its preparatory sketch, allowing viewers to see how an idea migrates from drawing to canvas. A 3D reproduction of the painting also makes the work accessible to visitors with visual impairments.

The exhibition opens with immersive multimedia installations that explain the scientific methods behind the research, framing technology not as a cold analytical tool but as a bridge between art history and human creativity. By “showing the work as if the artist were still at work,” the curators invite visitors to complete the image mentally—becoming participants rather than passive observers.

Ultimately, The unfinished argues that incompletion is not a weakness, but a powerful aesthetic category that has shaped art from antiquity to the present. As Pliny the Elder once wrote of Apelles’ unfinished Venus, sometimes what is left unresolved carries greater emotional force than what is fully polished.

Now open to the public, the exhibition offers a rare, intimate encounter with art in the making—where hesitation, revision, and imagination are not hidden, but finally brought to light.