{"id":12416,"date":"2016-11-06T19:53:06","date_gmt":"2016-11-06T18:53:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.arttrav.com\/?p=12416"},"modified":"2020-10-21T20:02:07","modified_gmt":"2020-10-21T18:02:07","slug":"borghese-gallery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.arttrav.com\/rome\/borghese-gallery\/","title":{"rendered":"The Best Way to Experience the Borghese Gallery"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Borghese Gallery<\/strong> is one of the most exciting museums in Rome<\/strong>. It’s densely packed with sculpture and painting that represents a concentrated moment in time and one ruthless collector’s taste. It’s not a huge museum (only 20 rooms), but the quality of the works is so high that it’s easy to loose track of time, and that is a fatal error, for this museum has timed entry… and timed exit. You are only allowed 2 hours inside! In the past, I’ve visited on my own and gotten “stuck” in the Venetian Renaissance room, hence missing out on the Bernini and Caravaggio works that most people go to the Borghese to see.<\/p>\n

\"The
The Venetian Room that I love<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This time I wanted to make sure I got a fuller view of the collection, so I booked the Borghese Gallery guided tour with Context Travel<\/a>. This museum has six Caravaggios, which is the highest number of Caravaggio paintings in one single location in the world! It’s got three really important Bernini sculptures. There’s Titian, and Raphael. Artists to whom are dedicated whole semester-long graduate seminars – in the case of Caravaggio you could do a whole course on the paintings in that room. Paintings and sculptures that tell religious stories, but even more that recount mythological ones – not all of which we readily know. Having an expert guide in this museum is unquestionably the best way to see the main works, in detail, and to come out having actually learned something.<\/p>\n

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Borghese Gallery history<\/h2>\n

This is a museum begotten by nepotism, and its founder, Cardinal Scipione Borghese, gives definition to that term. Blogger and guide “The Pines of Rome” explains this best here<\/a>:<\/p>\n

“Rome, 16 May 1605. Camillo Borghese is elected Pope Paul V and\u00a0immediately names his sister’s son, Scipione Caffarella, as Cardinal-Nephew. Not content with being a pope’s nephew, Scipione becomes the adopted son of his uncle and is known\u00a0thereafter as Scipione Borghese. He became the most unscrupulous collector the art world has ever seen.<\/p>\n

Scipione\u00a0must have realized that as Cardinal-Nephew in corrupt 17th-century Rome, he would have more than ample access to any funds he might require, and so he traded his right of inheritance\u00a0with his cousin Marcantonio, in exchange for every piece in\u00a0the family’s art collection […and] used his power to satisfy his obsession to possess the world’s greatest art.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He built the villa not as a Cardinal’s residence but as a place to keep all this great art. Modeled on country homes, it sits on the edge of a large park, and Scipione Borghese conceived it as a museum of the world, where art was shown head to head with botanical specimens, and artists would encounter and have interesting conversations. He did everything within his considerable power to make this happen, obtaining art by ruthless methods worthy of Sorrentino’s brilliant TV program “The Young Pope”. He didn’t even stop at stealing works from churches or jailing artists who refused to sell paintings to him.<\/p>\n

\"The
The villa that became the Borghese Gallery<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Borghese Gallery what to see<\/h2>\n

All this ruthlessness has made for one excellent collection! If you’re a regular reader you know I’m mostly interested in Renaissance painting. I particularly love the Venetians (even if I’ve written about them rather little here – a peril of being based in Florence). I’m not a fan of the Baroque, and even less so of anything that comes after that and before the late 20th century. So this museum has a few things that excite me a lot, and a few that excite me a bit less. For example, our guide made it a point of spending time looking at a fresco made for Scipione Borghese by Cavalier d’Arpino (Giuseppe Cesari) in one of the main rooms as it cleverly refers to some of the works we’d see inside. Cesari was one of the chief artists in Rome in the day, working in the late Mannerist style, and he also possessed an important collection of paintings that the Cardinal wanted to get his paws on, but I think his painting is horrid and most certainly would have skipped over it myself.<\/p>\n

In the risk of not doing the place justice, here is a short list of some of the most important works of art to see in the museum. I couldn’t possibly write about each in its full complexity, so encourage you to visit them in person as soon as you can, and to take a tour with a true expert in order to get the full story.<\/p>\n

Raphael<\/strong>. Just leave me on the bench in front of his Deposition<\/em>, which Scipione Borghese literally stole from a church in Perugia (and then had the Pope tell them it was a gift for his nephew, giving the poor Perugians no chance of ever seeing it again). This painting from 1507 fuses the best of Raphael’s colour and beauty (whom I’ve said sometimes I don’t like!<\/a>) with the best of Michelangelo’s dynamism and physicality. Raphael had recently been in Florence and had observed Michelangelo and Leonardo’s work in the Salone dei 500 at Palazzo Vecchio. The movement of Leonardo’s battle is something he incorporates here, while Michelangelo gets a direct nod in the awkward rotating position of the woman at the base of the group on the right, who recalls the Doni Tondo<\/a>. Preparatory drawings in the Louvre, Uffizi and London’s British Museum show that Raphael studied live models to get the right bodies and musculature, and that he struggled with the development of the most active possible way to render the composition. The result, in person, is quite stunning.<\/p>\n

\"The
The Raphael Room (there’s also the Lady with the Unicorn)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Titian<\/strong>. His Sacred and Profane<\/em> love is definitely the blockbuster of the “Venetian Room” at the Borghese. People love to repeat the anecdote that the Rothchilds offered to pay a sum for this painting that was superior to the entire worth of the whole museum collection, buildings and grounds. This much studied painting is an allegory commissioned in 1513 to celebrate the marriage of Niccol\u00f3 Aurelio, a secretary to the Council of Venice, to Laura Bagarotto. The most accepted interpretation is that it represents what its modern title says: two types of love. The Sacred on the right, nude and requiring no adornment, is put in contrast with the profane, represented in the made-up and bejewelled woman on the left. It’s a fun game to look through the landscape at the many elements, none of which are put there by chance.<\/p>\n

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Well hi there, my name is Venus. Oh, you too? How unusual! What are you doing by this sarcophagus in a field this lovely fall morning? I’m just hanging out watching this kid stir water…<\/a><\/p>\n

A photo posted by Alexandra Korey (@arttrav) on