Conferences
The Borghese Gallery's scientific meetings lectures and study days.
PILLS – Irene Micheletti
It was known as the “pearl” of Galleria Borghese at the end of the nineteenth century. This is how the press of the time referred to Titian’s “Sacred Love and Profane Love”: a painting capable of arousing keen interest well beyond Italy’s borders, particularly captivating artists of Wilhelmine Germany.
As scholar Irene Micheletti explains, for many German painters undertaking study trips to Italy, Renaissance collections constituted an essential visual and technical point of reference.
Among all the works they admired, the one executed by Titian around 1515 to celebrate the marriage of Niccolò Aurelio and Laura Bagarotto proved to be among the most closely examined, due to the complexity of its subject, the refinement of its palette, and the symbolic ambiguity that still characterizes its interpretation today. The rediscovery of the painting in the second half of the XIX century had particularly significant resonance. In 1864 Count Adolf von Schack commissioned Franz von Lenbach to produce a life-size copy of “Sacred Love and Profane Love”, intended to inaugurate a gallery of replicas of the most renowned Renaissance masterpieces. The result was considered exceptional and prompted growing demand for further copies, requested by public galleries such as Schwerin, Oldenburg, Brandenburg, and Karlsruhe, as well as by numerous private collectors. At the same time, the painting exerted direct influence on several German artists: Anselm Feuerbach echoed its compositional motifs in his Familienbild of 1866, while Arnold Böcklin studied its technique in depth, convinced that its luminous effects were achieved through a skillful combination of tempera and oil colors. An emblem of the great Italian pictorial tradition, “Sacred Love and Profane Love” thus became an iconographic and theoretical point of reference for late XIX century German artistic culture, offering a model to observe, copy, and reinterpret.
This contribution is part of the concluding conference of the 2022 PRIN (Project of Relevant National Interest) “Galleria Borghese and Its Publics, 1888–1938,” curated by Francesca Cappelletti and Lucia Simonato, which took place at Galleria Borghese on 29 September 2025. The study day focused on the museum’s relationship with its many visitors.
