Like the first page of a book, the introductory room offers the visitor a panorama of the context in which the Palazzo Gavotti Art Museum is located. The landscape of Savona and its surroundings is told mainly by works by local artists of the twentieth century who have interpreted its most characteristic aspects, from the airy sea, to the old port, to the glimpses of the alleys of the historic center. To these views have been added, with more recent acquisitions, the works of significant contemporary masters, such as Michele Cascella or Arturo Tosi, which span the wider panorama of landscape painting that has Liguria as its protagonist.

The figurative culture of the late Middle Ages in Savona is documented by some fourteenth-century masterpieces preserved in the museum. Historical sources confirm the political and economic importance of the city in the Middle Ages, but the surviving works that allow the reconstruction of contemporary artistic events are rare. From 1528, in fact, following a conflict, the Republic of Genoa wrested control of the citadel on the Priamàr from Savona, razed it to the ground to build an imposing fortress, quickly erasing the presence of some religious buildings and the precious testimonies art preserved in them.

The fifteenth century coincides with one of the most intense periods of vitality for Savona. The ascent to the papal throne of Francesco della Rovere from Savona, with the name of Sixtus IV, marks the beginning of an unrepeatable season of patronage, which involves the entire community. The fervent cultural climate attracts many artists, such as Vincenzo Foppa, Giovanni Mazone and Lorenzo Fasolo, represented at the museum by an extraordinary variety of subjects.

The years of the Savona episcopate of Giuliano della Rovere, nephew of Sixtus IV destined to succeed him with the name of Julius II, coincide with the affirmation, in the local artistic context, of the modern way and confirm the relationship that closely binds the city of Savona in Milan and other Lombard artistic centers.

Known as the Crucifixion of Savona, it is unique in the panorama of Italian Renaissance painting. Within the museum, the Crucifixion by Donato de 'Bardi is presented as an "exhibition of a single work" to solicit not only attention and curiosity but also emotions and suggestions caused by this absolute masterpiece. The particular layout of the large canvas offers the visitor a particularly intimate experience with the work, inviting him to reflect on a unique and highly selected painting.

Ligurian painting between the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries is represented by the works of the Genoese Giovanni Battista Carlone, Bartolomeo Biscaino and Domenico Piola and the Savonaese Gio Stefano Robatto and Bartolomeo Guidobono. The latter, in particular, present with various works also in the adjacent Museum of Ceramics, testifies to the fruitful relationship established in Savona between painting and ceramic art.

The works of painters Agostino and Carlo Giuseppe Ratti represent the art of the eighteenth century in Savona, a context in which the works of Paolo Gerolamo Brusco are also exhibited. Giovanni Agostino Ratti interprets the latest graceful movements of Arcadia with technical versatility, also represented in the Ceramics Museum in majolica painting, while his son Carlo Giuseppe Ratti, biographer of Genoese artists, testifies the evolution of the figurative arts towards neoclassicism and intellectual dimension of the Century of Enlightenment.

The nineteenth century is represented by the works of Giuseppe Frascheri, the most aware representative of historical-literary Romanticism in Liguria; in paintings with a strong lyrical and pathetic tone, in costume scenes and portraits. Solid draftsman and colorist, Nicolò Barabino, knew how to renew traditional history painting, updating his pictorial language to the new taste of the bourgeois client of the time, becoming a welcome interpreter of historical and religious subjects that brought him great fame and popularity in Italy.

A room dedicated to the twentieth century houses the paintings donated by Egidio Ercoli to the Civic Art Gallery of his city, in 2008. The works on display reflect, in the taste of the collector, the desire to represent the Italian painting of the first and second postwar period: Metaphysics and Magic Realism with Sironi, De Chirico and Savinio; Social Realism with Domenico Cantatore; themes and expressionistic ways with Alberto Sughi.