'', 1622–1625, Bernini commission (Galleria Borghese, Rome) Borghese used the immense wealth that he acquired as Cardinal Nephew to assemble one of the largest and most impressive art collections in Europe. The Borghese Collection began around a collection of paintings by Caravaggio,
Raphael, and
Titian, and of ancient
Roman art. Scipione also bought widely from leading painters and sculptors of his day. Even though later generations dispersed some of his acquisitions through sales and
diplomatic gifts, the works that he assembled form the core of the holdings of the
Galleria Borghese, a museum housed in the
villa commissioned by Scipione (1613–15) from the architect
Giovanni Vasanzio. Additional holdings were exhibited at the
Villa Mondragone. His collection was poetically described as early as 1613 by Scipione Francucci. The Satyr and Dolphin (Roman marble copy of lost Greek bronze, 4th century BCE) typifies the elegant and sensual depictions of young male figures that were prominently featured in Borghese's collection. One of his most prized works was the
Hermaphrodite (Roman copy after Greek original of 2nd century BCE). From the young sculptor
Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Scipione commissioned in 1620 a realistically rendered mattress on which to lay this sensuous nude figure. Borghese is reported to have kept this statue in a specially made wooden cupboard, which he would open with a theatrical flourish to the amusement of his close friends. However, this sculpture was given in the early 19th century to
Napoleon upon
Camillo Borghese's marriage to
Pauline Bonaparte, sister of Napoleon, and is now in the
Louvre. The Borghese collection today contains another 2nd-century copy that was found. , purchased in 1608 by Scipione from Cardinal Sfondrati (
National Gallery, London)
Pope Paul V willingly assisted his nephew's efforts to obtain the art works that aroused his interest. In 1607, the Pope gave the Cardinal a collection of 107 paintings which had been confiscated from the painter
Cavalier D'Arpino after the artist did not pay a tax bill. In the following year,
Raphael's Deposition was secretly removed from the Baglioni Chapel in the church of San Francesco in Perugia and transported to Rome to be given to Scipione through a papal
motu proprio. The Borgheses were forced to provide Perugia with two excellent copies of the painting to avoid conflict with the angered city becoming violent, but the original remains in the Borghese collection.
Caravaggio Among the pictures that Borghese acquired through the 1607 seizure from Cavaliere d'Arpino were two important early works by Caravaggio (both 1593, still in Galleria Borghese): a probable self-portrait, usually called
Sick Bacchus, and
Boy with a Basket of Fruit, an overtly homoerotic image of a youth extending a large basket of fruit seductively toward the viewer. Borghese also greatly admired Caravaggio's naturalistic and psychologically complex later religious paintings, such as the brooding Saint John the Baptist (1605/6), which the collector acquired from the artist's estate shortly after his death, and the intense
David with the Head of Goliath (1609/10), which represents the Biblical hero extending outwards a severed head with the features of the artist Borghese appropriated Caravaggio's
Madonna and Child with St. Anne, a large altarpiece commissioned in 1605 for a chapel in the Basilica of Saint Peter's, but rejected by the College of Cardinals because of its earthly realism and unconventional iconography. Recent archival research has established that Borghese intended from the early stages of the commission that the altarpiece would end up in his own collection.
Patronage of Bernini Borghese's early patronage of artist
Gian Lorenzo Bernini assisted to establish him as the leading Italian sculptor and architect of the seventeenth century. Between 1618 and 1623, Bernini worked primarily for the Cardinal, creating innovative pieces that would become early touchstones of the Baroque style. For the decoration of the Villa Borghese, Bernini produced a life-sized figure of
David (1623) and three sculptural groups with mythological themes. The culminating work in this series that Bernini created for Borghese,
Apollo and Daphne (1623–1625), represents an incident popular in Italian poetry of the early seventeenth century, and ultimately derived from the Metamorphoses by the ancient Roman poet Ovid. Bernini depicts Apollo reaching out toward the river nymph Daphne just as she is transformed into a laurel tree by her father in order to prevent her from being burned by the touch of the god of the sun. Understood within its original intellectual context, this group represents frustrated desire and enduring despair and pain, provoked by love. These meanings may have had special resonance for Borghese, who, at the time, was widely ridiculed for his attraction to other men. The specific moment depicted by Bernini also was thought in the early seventeenth century to signify the fusion of genders, more explicitly depicted in the Hermaphrodite also in the Cardinal's collection. In 1632 Bernini executed
two marble portrait busts of Borghese (both in Rome's
Galleria Borghese). These works capture the exuberance that the Cardinal's friends admired and which his critics decried as frivolity inappropriate to his office.
Collection Although he is most associated with the development of the
Baroque, he also eagerly collected works of many artists of quite different styles. Borghese's collection includes works as diverse as Early Renaissance altarpieces such as
Fra Angelico's Last Judgment (ca 1450); examples of northern art such as two paintings of Venus (early 16th century) by
Lucas Cranach; sixteenth-century Venetian paintings such as
Titian's
Sacred and Profane Love (1514); and classicizing pictures such as
Domenichino's
Diana (1616/7). The Cardinal even owned a very uncharacteristic work by
Michelangelo, a depiction of Cupid now called "The Manhattan Marble". ==References==