Galleria Borghese
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The Borghese Gallery is one of the world’s greatest small museums. A half dozen of Bernini’s best sculptures and Caravaggio paintings casually occupy the same rooms as Classical, Renaissance and Neo-Classical works. The setting is the beautiful frescoed 17th-century villa set in the greenery of Villa Borghese park, all of which once belonged to the great art-lover of the early Baroque, Cardinal Scipione Borghese. Scipione patronized the young Bernini and Caravaggio, in the process amassing one of Rome’s richest private collections.
For more masterpieces in Rome (see Artistic Masterpieces)
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1. Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne
A climactic moment frozen in marble (1622–5). As Apollo is inches from grabbing Daphne, the pitying gods transform her into a laurel.
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2. Bernini’s Rape of Persephone
Bernini carved this masterpiece at age 23 (1621–2). Muscular Hades throws his head back with laughter, his strong fingers pressing into the maiden’s soft flesh as she struggles to break free of his grasp.
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3. Bernini’s David
Young Bernini’s David (1623–4) was the Baroque answer to Michelangelo’s Renaissance version. The frowning face is a self-portrait.
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4. Caravaggio’s Madonna of the Serpent
Baroque tastes disliked this altarpiece’s lack of ornamentation (1605). It spent only weeks on St Peter’s altar before being moved to a lesser church then sold to Borghese.
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5. Canova’s Pauline Bonaparte
Napoleon’s sister caused a scandal with this half-naked portrait (1805–8), lounging like a Classical goddess on a carved marble cushion.
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6. Caravaggio’s Self-Portrait as a Sick Bacchus
This early self-portrait (1593) as the wine god was painted with painstaking detail, supposedly when the artist was ill. It shows finer brushwork than later works.
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7. Raphael’s Deposition
The Borghese’s most famous painting (1507), although neither the gallery’s nor Raphael’s best. The Perugian matriarch Atalante Baglioni commissioned the work to honour her assassinated son (perhaps the red-shirted pall-bearer).
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8. Bernini’s Aeneas and Anchises
Pietro Bernini was still guiding his 15-year-old son in this 1613 work. The carving is more timid and static than in later works, but the genius is already evident.
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9. Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love
Titian’s allegorical scene (1514), painted for a wedding, exhorts the young bride that worldly love is part of the divine, and that sex is an extension of holy matrimony.
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10. Correggio’s Danae
A sensual masterpiece (1531) based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses . Cupid pulls back the sheets as Jupiter, the golden shower above her head, rains his love over Danae.
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