• Info & Description

    Time: Daily; not Mon Tue-Sun 8.30am-7.30pm
    Cost: €8.50; concessions €5.25
    Rome:

    The Galleria Borghese, housed in an elegant marble villa in the Villa Borghese park, contains masterpieces collected by the powerful nephew of Pope Paul V, Cardinal Scipione. Paintings and sculptures by masters like Botticelli, Caravaggio and Bernini are on display.



    The man for whom the term "nepotism" was coined, Scipione Borghese himself features in his collection in a masterful sculpture by Bernini. He may have been cruel, intractable and thoroughly unpleasant but his eye for great art was undeniable.

    Highlights include Bernini's sculpture of Apollo and Daphne in which the wood nymph's prayers to be spared a ravishing by Apollo are answered when she is turned into a tree before your very eyes. Bernini made the work from one piece of Carrara marble and as you walk around it, the nymph's fingers become leaves and her feet transform into roots.

    The Caravaggio room features more works by the master than can be seen anywhere else in the world, including his early self-portrait as a Sick Bacchus, his alluring Boy with a Basket of Fruit, a thoughtful St Jerome and the terrifying David with the Head of Goliath in which the painter's own face appears as the decapitated head of Goliath.

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