Galleria Borghese

In a casino built for pleasure in the gardens of Villa Borghese, one family's seventeenth-century collecting instinct produced a museum with no fillers: Bernini's early masterpieces, a room of Caravaggios, Raphael's Deposition, and Canova's marble Paolina.

Why it matters

The Galleria Borghese preserves the taste of a single decisive collector: Cardinal Scipione Caffarelli Borghese (1577–1633), nephew of Pope Paul V, whose acquisitions the museum's own collection site calls one of the greatest of the age. Within a few years he secured around a hundred paintings from the studio seizure of Cavalier d'Arpino in 1607 — including early Caravaggios — bought seventy-one pictures from Cardinal Sfondrato, and famously had Raphael's Deposition carried out of Perugia by night in 1608. Into this setting the young Gian Lorenzo Bernini set the sculpture group the gallery is now identified with: Aeneas and Anchises, the Rape of Proserpina, David and Apollo and Daphne, all executed between 1618 and 1625 for the cardinal. Two centuries later Canova carved Paolina Borghese Bonaparte as Venus Victrix for the same family. The result is a museum where the history of Roman baroque can be read in twenty frescoed rooms without a filler canvas on the wall.

What to notice

On the ground floor, Apollo and Daphne shows marble turning into bark and leaves at the instant of transformation — look at Daphne's fingers; the Rape of Proserpina carries the imprint of a hand pressed into a thigh, a technical tour de force that made the twenty-something sculptor's name; David coiling to throw replaces the composed poses of earlier depictions of David with an athlete's compression. Upstairs, the pinacoteca gives you Caravaggio's Boy with a Basket of Fruit and the Madonna dei Palafrenieri, set among Raphael's Deposition of Christ and paintings acquired from the collections of early-seventeenth-century Rome. In Room I, Canova's Paolina reclines in the pose her brother's empire made fashionable — the mattress carved as if it were cloth. The museum's own records note that around 260 further paintings rest in the deposits above the pinacoteca, a reminder that what you see is the curated peak of a much larger collection. Camillo Borghese's sale of antiquities to Napoleon to the Louvre in 1807–1808 explains why the classical sculptures that once anchored the rooms now live in Paris.

Context and history

The collection grew with the Borghese papacy of Paul V (1605–1621) and never quite stopped growing: by the end of the seventeenth century the family held about eight hundred paintings and one of Rome's most celebrated antiquities collections. The Napoleonic marriage — Paolina Bonaparte wed Prince Camillo Borghese — led to the forced sale of the antique sculptures to the Louvre between late 1807 and 1808, while Camillo commissioned Canova's Paolina and bought Correggio's Danae in 1827. A family trust, first imposed at Scipione's death and renewed in 1833, kept the core intact until the Italian State bought the museum and gallery in 1902. The building itself, a casino of the Villa Pinciana described already in 1650 by Giacomo Manilli, was conceived as much for music, conversation and the display of art as for living. It is a state museum under Italy's Ministry of Culture.