Galleria Borghese Site Features

Bernini's sculpture groups, in the rooms they were made for

Apollo and Daphne (1622–1625), The Rape of Proserpina and David were commissioned by Scipione Borghese for this building. They are carved to be walked around, and the intended approach matters — Apollo and Daphne is composed so that the transformation reveals itself as you move, not from a single viewpoint.

Six Caravaggios

Including the Boy with a Basket of Fruit, the St Jerome and the late David with the Head of Goliath. Scipione Borghese was an early and aggressive collector of a painter who was, at the time, in legal trouble.

Canova's Pauline Borghese as Venus Victrix. Napoleon's sister, married into the family that sold the antiquities to her brother, reclining as Venus. The biography and the marble are inseparable here.

Raphael and Titian upstairs

Raphael's Deposition and Titian's Sacred and Profane Love anchor the painting floor, alongside Lorenzo Lotto's Portrait of a Gentleman (1535), Bassano's Last Supper (1546) and Domenichino's Hunt of Diana (1617).

The antique sculpture that stayed

The Artemis Borghese, a Greek original of the fourth century BC, stands in a wall niche of Asprucci's design; the Lysippus group of Silenus carrying the infant Bacchus gives its name to Hall VIII. A second-century Roman mosaic of a fishing scene and Greek sarcophagi of the same century are set into the fabric of the rooms.

Bernini's self-portrait

Easy to walk past among the seventeenth-century paintings, and worth not walking past: the sculptor of the three groups downstairs, painted by himself.