THE BORGHESE FAMILY AND THE ANTIQUITY

The “The Borghese Family and Antiquity” exhibition that is beginning at the Galleria Borghese – the sixth in the Ten Major Exhibitions series – differs from all the previous ones, and in many ways constitutes an event of exceptional historical significance.

Thanks to the extraordinary cooperation of the Louvre Museum, for the first time since 1807, when the collection of ancient art was sold by Camillio Boghese to Napoleon Bonapart, the rooms of the villa are once gain hosting several of the most celebrated masterpieces of what was one of the most famous archaeological collections in Rome.    .

The works are not simply “displayed”, but – according to the project  conceived by Anna Coliva, Marina Minozzi, Jean‐Luc Martinez, and Marie‐Lou Fabréga‐Dubert, the curators – are presented as they were historically. The ground floor of the Museum, which still has the late-18th-century decoration commissioned by  Marcantonio IV Borghese, is the magnificent context where the statues are arranged as described by Ennio Quirino Visconti in 1796. The rooms on the second floor of the villa, instead, host the evocative 17th-century juxtaposition of paintings and sculptures, in line with the taste of Cardinal Scipione Borghese, the founder of the collection and of the villa itself.