Galleria Borghese in Rome was built in the early 17th century as a hunting lodge for Villa Borghese by Cardinal Scipio Borghese Caffarelli who commissioned first Flaminio Ponzio and, after his death, the Flemish architect Jan van Santen, better known as Giovanni Vasanzio.
With its two side avant-corps, the little palace echoes the architectural model of the nearby Villa Medici on the Pincian Hill, a style also used for Agostino Chigi’s Villa Farnesina in Trastevere in the early 1500s. In the years of the Borghese Popes, the Galleria became a jewel chest of treasures that the Cardinal acquired in any way possible (for example, the night-time theft of Raphael’s Deposizione from the Church of St. Francis in Perugia).
Today, the rooms are presented in the splendour to which they were restored by Marcantonio Borghese IV who began work in 1770 with architect Camillo Asprucci and painters like Mariano Rossi, Cristoforo Unterperger and others. However, in 1807, Camillo Borghese, husband of Pauline Bonaparte, sold Napoleon 695 marble pieces from the collection which are in the Louvre to this day. Antonio Canova called this “an indelible shame”.
Acquired by the government in 1902, Galleria Borghese became a public museum exhibiting an endless range of masterpieces by Caravaggio, Bernini, Titian, Canova, Raphael, Domenichino, Rubens, Correggio, Lotto, Giorgione, Dosso Dossi, Botticelli, Antonello da Messina, Piero di Cosimo and many others.
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