Galleria Borghese

At the end of the sixteenth century the Borghese, a wealthy family from Siena, bought land north of Rome outside the Porta Pinciana and began turning it, piece by piece, into an immense park. Their standing in the Roman aristocracy rose with it, above all when Camillo Borghese was elected pope in 1605 as Paul V, and the family then set about building a villa in their park on the Pincio. Work began in 1607 under Flaminio Ponzio, who had already built for the Borghese at their palace on the left bank of the Tiber and who worked up sketches by the pope's nephew, Cardinal Scipione Borghese. When Ponzio died in 1613 the Flemish architect Giovanni Vasanzio was charged with finishing the building, while Carlo Rainaldi's work on the gardens went on until 1620.

The casino went up outside the walls of Rome, its nearest gate the Porta del Popolo, on grounds whose circumference approached five kilometres. The many windows and the arrangement of the rooms were laid out so that the works would be well seen. The portico carried spolia taken from the Arch of Claudius, which had stood on the Via Flaminia, the façade was worked with 144 bas-reliefs and 70 busts, and Lodovico Cigoli painted frescoes in the villa, among them a Story of Psyche. Pieces of Scipione's collection were already arriving in March 1613, brought up to the Pincio from the Palazzo Dal Borgo, where the pope's brothers lived.

Scipione Borghese was an early patron of Gian Lorenzo Bernini, and a large part of Bernini's secular sculpture was made for him and is still shown in the rooms it was meant for: the Goat Amalthea with the infant Jupiter and a faun of 1615, Aeneas, Anchises and Ascanius of 1618 and 1619, the Rape of Proserpina of 1621 and 1622, Apollo and Daphne of 1622 to 1625, and the David, carved in 1623 and 1624. Two busts of the cardinal followed in 1632, the second cut after a large crack was found in the marble of the first while it was being made.

The cardinal collected Caravaggio avidly, and six of his pictures are in the gallery, among them the Boy with a Basket of Fruit, the Sick Bacchus and the David with the Head of Goliath; Titian's Sacred and Profane Love and Raphael's Baglioni Entombment are there as well. Ferrarese pictures by Mazzolino, Ortolano and Garofalo were bought by Scipione through the good offices of Cardinal Bentivoglio, after the devolution of Ferrara to the Papal States.

By 1644 John Evelyn could describe the place as "an Elysium of delight", with "Fountains of sundry inventions, Groves and small Rivulets of Water", and a vivarium holding ostriches, peacocks, swans, cranes "and divers strange Beasts".

Prince Marcantonio IV Borghese, who lived from 1730 to 1800, began recasting the park's formal garden architecture into an English landscape garden and, in the 1770s, turned to the casina itself, putting the work in the hands of the architect Antonio Asprucci. Asprucci engaged craftsmen for frescoes, stuccoes and polychrome marble; the outdated tapestry and leather hangings came down, and the Borghese sculptures and antiquities were restaged in a new thematic order that celebrated the family's position in Rome, with much of the new painting given over to its history, from the Roman hero Marcus Furius Camillus to the Borghese of the prince's own day. He decorated the hall of the emperors between 1778 and 1780 and the Egyptian room between 1778 and 1782.

In 1808 Prince Camillo Borghese, Napoleon's brother-in-law, was forced to sell the Borghese Roman sculptures and antiquities to the Emperor. The Borghese Gladiator, renowned since the 1620s as the most admired single sculpture in the villa, must now be seen in the Louvre, as must the Borghese Hermaphroditus. Two more of the villa's pieces are in the Louvre as well: the neo-Attic krater that had given the first room its old name of the Sala del Vaso, and the Lysippos group of Silenus carrying the infant Bacchus, which Asprucci had set at the centre of a room named for it and which a Dancing Satyr has replaced since 1834. In 1834 a mosaic of gladiators of about 320 to 330 AD was found on the Borghese estate at Torrenova, on the Via Casilina outside Rome.

In 1891 the paintings kept in the twelve rooms of the picture gallery at the Palazzo Borghese in the Via Ripetta were brought up to the piano nobile of the villa on the Pincio. In 1902 the Italian state acquired the collections held under the Borghese fideicommissum, along with the villa, the estate and the surrounding gardens and parkland, and the building was turned into a museum. The purchase has been called the deal of the century: after nearly ten years of exhausting negotiation the state paid three million six hundred thousand lire of the day for the estate, the villa and every work of art in it. Giovanni Piancastelli was the gallery's first director, and was succeeded in 1906 by Giulio Cantalamessa, who had directed the galleries of the Accademia in Venice.

The gallery closed in 1983 for a complete restoration that lasted fourteen years and gave the outside of the building back its original appearance, its plasterwork, its statues and its double-ramp staircase. It reopened in June 1997. The rehabilitation of the villa as a public museum in the late eighteenth century was itself the subject of an exhibition at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles in 2000, prompted by the Getty's purchase of 54 drawings connected with that project.

In 2006 the gallery began a programme it called the Ten Great Exhibitions, ten monographic shows in ten years. It was built around a difficulty: a large part of the collection cannot leave the building, the works being too delicate, too large or on too fragile a support to travel to the exhibitions mounted around the world, so loans from major museums elsewhere were brought to them instead. The first show, on Raphael, ran from 19 May to 10 September 2006; Canova followed from October 2007 to February 2008, with some sixty works of which eighteen were sculptures, then Correggio and the antique in 2008, Caravaggio set against Francis Bacon in 2009 and 2010, Cranach the Elder in 2010 and 2011, the Borghese and the antique in 2011 and 2012, Titian in 2012, Dosso Dossi in 2013, Domenichino in 2014 and Bernini in 2015.

The gallery belongs to the ministry responsible for cultural heritage, which since 2014 has counted it among the museum institutes granted special autonomy. In 2013 it was the ninth most-visited state site in Italy, with 498,477 visitors. Anna Coliva was appointed director in 2015 by the culture minister Dario Franceschini, and Francesca Cappelletti has directed the gallery since November 2020.