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The Borghese
Gallery (Italian: Galleria Borghese)
inRome 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 ollection of
paintings, sculpturCardinal 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
ofBernini 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, aphael's depiction of the
Entombment of Christ and works by Peter Paul
Rubens and Federico Barocci.The Casina Borghese
lies on the outskirts of seventeenth-century
Rome. By 1644, John Evelyn described it as an
Elysium of delight with Fountains of sundry
inventions, Groves and small Rivulets of Water.
Evelyn also described the Vivarium; that housed
ostriches, peacocks, swans and cranes and
divers strange Beasts. Prince Marcantonio IV
Borghese (1730-1800), who began the recasting
of the park's formal garden architecture into
an English landscape garden, also set out about
1775, under the guidance of the architect
Antonio Asprucci, to replace the now-outdated
tapestry and leather hangings and renovate the
Casina, restaging the Borghese sculptures and
antiquities in a thematic new ordering that
celebrated the Borghese position in Rome. |