GALLERIA BORGHESE

Galleria Borghese, Rome

The Borghese Gallery (Italian: Galleria Borghese) in Rome is an art gallery housed in the former Villa Borghese Pinciana, a building that was from the first integral with its gardens, nowadays considered quite separately by tourists as the Villa Borghese gardens. The Galleria Borghese houses a substantial part of the Borghese 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 himself, who used it as a villa suburbana, a party villa at the edge of Rome.
Scipione Borghese was an early patron of Bernini and an avid collector of works by Caravaggio, who is well represented in the collection by his Boy with a Basket of Fruit, St. Jerome, Sick Bacchus and others. Other paintings of note include Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love, Raphael’s Entombment of Christ and works by Peter Paul Rubens and Federico Barocci.

One joy of the Galleria Borghese is that it is compact: housed in twenty rooms across two floors, its visit could take as little as two hours.
The main floor is mostly devoted to classical antiquities of the 1st–3rd centuries AD (including a famous 320-30 AD mosaic of gladiators found on the Borghese estate at Torrenova, on the Via Casilina outside Rome, in 1834), and classical and neo-classical sculpture such as the Venus Victrix (above). Its decorative scheme includes a 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. *
Gian Lorenzo Bernini at the Borghese*
Many of the sculptures are displayed in the spaces they were intended for, including nearly two handfuls of works by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, which comprise a large percent of his lifetime output of secular sculpture, starting with a juvenile, but talented, work such as the Goat Amalthea with Infant Jupiter and Faun (1615) to his dynamic Apollo and Daphne (1622–25) and David (1623) considered seminal works of baroque sculpture. In addition, three busts by this sculptor are in the gallery, two of Pope Paul V (1618–20) and an insightful portrait of his first patron, Cardinal Scipione Borghese (1632). Finally it has some early, somewhat mannerist works such as Aeneas, Anchises & Ascanius (1618–19) and the Rape of Proserpine (1621–22).

PRICE
9.50 euro

BOOKING TICKETS
http://www.rome-museum.com/vatican2ind.php

OPENING TIME
From Tuesday to Sunday from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. ( last entrance at 5 p.m. ))

TIME SLOTS
Entrance / exit: 09 a.m. – 11 a.m. / 11 a.m.- 01 p.m. / 01 p.m.03 p.m. / 03 p.m. 05 p.m. / 05 p.m.-07 p.m.

CONNECTION

  • Villa Borghese internal bus: Electric bus 116
  • Buses passing through Villa Borghese: 88, 95, 490, 495, 49
  • Buses that connect with roads around Villa Borghese : 910, 52, 53, 628, 926, 223, 217
  • Tram: 19, 3, 2
  • Underground train : Line A (Flaminio or Spagna stations)
  • Main line station : Piazzale Flaminio (Rome–Viterbo)