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Galleria Borghese Review

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Galleria Borghese

Address: Piazza Scipione Borghese 5, off Via Pinciana, Villa Borghese, Rome
Phone: 06/8413979 information; 06/32810 reservations
www.galleriaborghese.it

Category: Museums/Galleries
Location: Villa Borghese and Piazza del Popolo

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Fodor's Review:

It's a real toss-up which is more magnificent—the villa built for Cardinal Scipione Borghese in 1615 or the collection of 17th- and 18th-century art that lies within. The luxury-loving cardinal built Rome's most splendiferous palace as a showcase for his fabulous antiquities collection. The Casino Borghese, as the building is known, was constructed also to provide an elegant venue for summer parties and musical evenings. Today, it's a monument to Roman 17th-century interior decoration at its most extravagant: room after room opulently adorned with porphyry and alabaster and topped with vast ceiling frescoes make for an eye-popping spectacle unequaled in Rome. With the passage of time, the building has become less celebrated than the collections housed within it, including one of the finest collections of Baroque sculpture to be found anywhere.

Like the gardens, the casino and its collections have undergone many changes since the 17th century. Camillo Borghese, the husband of Napoléon's sister Pauline, was responsible for most of them. He sold off a substantial number of the paintings to Napoléon and swapped 200 of the classical sculptures for an estate in Piedmont, in northern Italy, also courtesy of Napoléon. All of those paintings and sculptures are in the Louvre in Paris. At the end of the 19th century, a later member of the family, Francesco Borghese, replaced some of the gaps in the collections with new acquisitions, and also transferred to the casino the remaining works of art then housed in Palazzo Borghese. In 1902 the casino, its contents, and the park were sold to the Italian government.

The most famous work in the collection is Canova's Neoclassical sculpture of Pauline Borghese. It is technically known as Venus Victrix, but there has never been any doubt as to the identity of its real subject. Pauline reclines on a Roman sofa, bare-bosomed, her hips swathed in classical drapery, the very model of haughty detachment and sly come-hither.

The next two rooms hold two key early Baroque sculptures: Bernini's David and Apollo and Daphne. Both illustrate Bernini's extraordinary technical facility. Both also demonstrate the Baroque desire to invest sculpture with a living quality, to imbue inert marble with a sense of live flesh. Whereas Renaissance sculptors wanted to capture the idealized beauty of the human form that they had admired in ancient Greek and Roman sculptures, Baroque sculptors such as Bernini wanted movement and drama as well, capturing not an essence but an instant, infused with theatricality and emotion. The Apollo and Daphne shows the moment when, to escape the pursuing Apollo, Daphne is turned into a laurel tree. Leaves and twigs sprout from her fingertips as she stretches agonizingly away from Apollo, who instinctively recoils in terror and amazement. This is the stuff that makes the Baroque exciting. There are other Berninis on view in the collection, notably a very uncharacteristic work, a large unfinished figure called Verità, or Truth. Bernini had started work on this brooding figure after the death of his principal patron, Pope Urban VIII. It was meant to form part of a work titled Truth Revealed by Time. The next pope, Innocent X, had little love for the ebullient Urban, and, as was the way in Rome—as also the world at large—this meant that Bernini, too, would be excluded from the new pope's favors. However, Bernini's towering genius was such that the new pope came around with his patronage with almost indecent haste.

The Caravaggio Room holds works by this hotheaded genius, who died of malaria at age 37. The disquieting Sick Bacchus and charming Boy with a Basket of Fruit are naturalistic early works, bright and fresh compared with a dark Madonna and the David and Goliath, in which Goliath is believed to be a self-portrait. In the Pinacoteca (Picture Gallery) on the second floor of the casino, three Raphaels (including his moving Deposition), a Botticelli, and a Pinturicchio are only a few of the paintings that the cardinal chose for his collection. Probably the most famous painting in the gallery is Titian's allegorical Sacred and Profane Love, with a nude figure representing sacred love.

Admission to the Museo is by reserved ticket. Visitors are admitted in two-hour shifts 9 AM to 5 pm. Prime-time slots can sell out days in advance, so in high season reserve by phone or through www.ticketeria.it. You need to collect your reserved ticket at the museum ticket office a half hour before your entrance. However, when it's not busy you can purchase your ticket at the museum for the next entrance appointment.

Cost: EUR 10.50 (including EUR 2 reservation fee); audio guide or English tour EUR 5
Open: Tues.-Sun. 9-7, with sessions on the hour every two hours

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