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The Galleria Borghese Museum houses and displays a collection of ancient sculptures, bas-reliefs, and mosaics, as well as paintings and sculptures dating from the 15th through the 19th centuries. Among the masterpieces of the collection – the first and most important part of which goes back to the collecting of Cardinal Scipione Borghese (1579-1633), nephew of Pope Paul V – are paintings by Caravaggio, Raphael, Titian, Correggio, Antonello da Messina, and Giovanni Bellini and sculptures by Gian Lorenzo Bernini and Canova. The works are displayed in the 20 frescoed rooms that, together with the portico and the entrance hall, constitute the spaces of the Museum open to the public. More than 260 paintings are housed in the storerooms of the Galleria Borghese, which are located above the floor of the Pinacoteca and set up like a picture gallery. The storerooms may be visited by booking a time.
For safety reasons connected with the structure of the building, a maximum of 360 people at a time are admitted to the Museum for visits lasting two hours, after which they must leave
Villa Borghese "outside Porta Pinciana", within which the Galleria is located, rose at the beginning of the seventeenth century on a family property, to which other plots of land were gradually added, until an immense park was constituted. The rapid ascent in Rome of the Borghese family, which was originally from Siena, culminated in the election as pope of Camillo (1605-1621), who took the name of Paul V and began the great era of urban works and extraordinary feats of art collecting.
With the ascension to the papal throne of Paul V Borghese (1605-1621), his cardinal nephew, Scipione Caffarelli Borghese (1577-1633), began to intensely commission architecture and at the same time to acquire works of art that would make his collection one of the largest of his time.
By confiscating the paintings in Cavalier d’Arpino’s studio, in 1607 he gained possession of about 100 works, including several youthful ones by Caravaggio. In the same year, he acquired the patriarch of Aquileia’s collection, while in 1608 he obtained 71 extraordinary paintings belonging to Cardinal Sfondrato, which presumably included Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love, as well as the Portrait of Julius II (London, National Gallery) and the Madonna of Loreto (Chantilly, Musée Condé) by Raphael.
The cardinal nephew’s extreme unscrupulousness in obtaining works of art and in indulging his passion as a modern collector is shown in numerous episodes, such as his acquisition in 1605 of Caravaggio’s Madonna and Child with St. Anne, which had been rejected by the Confraternity shortly before it was to be displayed in the chapel in St. Peter’s – perhaps as ordered by the pope himself – and the incredible theft of Raphael’s Deposition, which was removed on behalf of Scipione from the convent of San Francesco a Prato in Perugia, lowered from the town walls during the night between March 18 and 19, 1608, and subsequently declared ‘the cardinal’s private property” by Paul V.
There were other works by Raphael in the Borghese collection, as proof of its indisputable excellence – the Three Graces (Chantilly, Musée Condé), the Vision of a Knight, and St. Catherine of Alexandria (London, National Gallery), which the family sold during the years of the French Revolution.
Address: Piazzale Scipione Borghese, 5 Roma
Official website: www.galleriaborghese.beniculturali.it
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