Galleria Borghese

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The Borghese Gallery (Italian: Galleria Borghese) is a former villa, the Villa Borghese Pinciana ("Borghese villa on the Pincio") in the eponymous park of the Villa Borghese in Rome. It houses a substantial collection of paintings, sculpture and antiquities begun by Cardinal Scipione Borghese, the nephew of Pope Paul V (reign 1605–1621). The Villa was built by the architect Flaminio Ponzio, developing sketches by Scipione Borghese, who used it as a villa suburbana, a party villa, at the edge of Rome.

Many of the sculptures are displayed in the spaces they were intended for, including early works commissioned Gian Lorenzo Bernini by his first patron Scipione. Napoleon Bonaparte's sister Pauline married into the Borghese family and Antonio Canova's half-nude reclining portrait of her as Venus Victrix takes pride of place in one of the galleries. A famously controversial woman in her lifetime, when asked how she could pose for the sculptor wearing so little, she reputedly replied that there was a stove in the studio that kept her warm.

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Scipione Borghese was an avid collector of works by Caravaggio, who is well represented in the collection by his Boy with a Basket of Fruit, St. Jerome, Young Sick Bacchus, and others. Other paintings of note include Titian's Sacred and Profane Love, Raphael's Deposition and works by Peter Paul Rubens and Federico Barocci (illustration, left).

Image:Borghese gladiator 1 mosaic dn r2 c2.jpg One joy of the Galleria Borghese is that it is compact: housed in 20 rooms across two floors, a visit could take as little as two hours. The main floor, mostly devoted to sculpture and Roman antiquities of the 1st–3rd centuries AD (including a famous mosaic of gladiators, right), has a consistently breathtaking decorative scheme. The trompe l'oeil ceiling fresco in the first room, or Salone, by the Sicilian artist Mariano Rossi makes such good use of foreshortening that it appears almost three-dimensional.

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Bernini Collection

Image:Ratto di proserpina.PNG The nearly two handfuls of works by Bernini comprise a large percent of his lifetime output of secular sculpture; this gallery is where you can see the sponsored Bernini mature from a juvenile, but talented, work such as the Goat Amalthea with Infant Jupiter and a Faun (1615) [1]to his supreme and dynamic Apollo and Daphne (1622–25)[2]and David (1623) [3]considered seminal works of baroque sculpture. In addition, the gallery contains three busts, two of Pope Paul V (1618–20) and one marvelously conversive and stunningly innovative portrait of his patron, Cardinal Scipione Borghese (1632).[4]Finally it has some early, less successful, somewhat mannerist, but masterful works such as Aeneas, Anchises & Ascanius (1618–19) [5] and the Giambologna-emulating Pluto's Rape of Prosperpine (1621-22).[6]Finally a personal, somewhat emotionally muddled allegory of Truth Unveiled by Time (1646–52). [7]

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Nearby museums

Also in Villa Borghese gardens or nearby are the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna, which specialises in 19th- and 20th-century Italian art, and Museo Nazionale Etrusco at the Villa Giulia, a collection of pre-Roman objects, mostly Etruscan, excavated around Rome.

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