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The Borghese Gallery (Italian Galleria Borghese) is a former illa, the illa Borghese Pinciana ("Borghese illa on the Pincio") in the eponymous park of the illa Borghese in Rome. It houses a substantial collection of paintings, sculpture and antiquities begun by Cardinal Scipione Borghese, the nephew of Pope Paul . The illa was built by the architect Flaminio
Ponzio, deeloping sketches by Scipio Borghese, who used it as a illa suburbana, a party illa at the edge of Rome.
Many of the sculptures are displayed in the spaces they were intended for, including three early works commissioned by Scipione Borghese from Gian Lorenzo Bernini: Apollo and Daphne, Pluto and Proserpina and Daid. Napoleon Bonaparte's sister Pauline married into the Borghese family and Antonio Canoa's half-nude portrait of her as enus ictrix takes pride of place in one of the galleries. A famously controversial woman in her lifetime, when asked how she could pose or the sculptor wearing so little, she reputedly replied that there was a stoe in the studio that kept her warm!
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Scipione Borghese was an aid collector of works by Caraaggio, 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 Loe, Raphavel's depiction of the Entombment of Christ and works by Peter Paul Rubens and Federico Barocci
One of the joys of the Galleria Borghese is that it is so compact: it is housed in 20 rooms across two floors and a isit encompassing everything on display could take as little as two hours. The main floor, mostly deoted to sculpture and Roman antiquities, has a consistently breathtaking decoratie sheme. The 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.
The illa Borghese is home to two other museums, namely Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna, which specialises in 19th- and
20th-century Italian art, and
Museo Nazionale Etrusco, a collection of pre-Roman objects, mostly Etruscan, excaated around Rome.
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