Making a Prince's Museum: Drawings for the Late-Eighteenth-Century Redecoration of the Villa Borghese

The Galleria Borghese, located in the casino of the Villa Borghese on the Pincian Hill in Rome, is one of the world's foremost museums today. Cardinal Scipione Borghese, nephew of Pope Paul V (r. 1605-21), commissioned the casino and grounds of the villa and formed a collection of Old Master paintings and sculpture (including works by Raphael, Titian, Caravaggio, and Bernini) that remains on view to this day. The present appearance of the casino is, however, the product of a late-eighteenth-century renovation commissioned by Prince Marcantonio IV Borghese and executed by the architect Antonio Asprucci. As Carole Paul demonstrates in her recent study, Asprucci integrated a decorative program with the exhibition of statuary, both ancient and modern, creating a design that was strikingly innovative; at the same time, the aims of the patron, Prince Marcantonio, closely resembled those of his seicento ancestors. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Borghese used their villa to assert and display their family's preeminent position in Rome's cultural and political life.

In the era of Paul V the Borghese family was relatively new to Rome, having arrived from Siena in the second quarter of the sixteenth century. With the papal election of 1605, the Borghese climbed to the highest rank in the ecclesiastical hierarchy. The papacy brought this modest, foreign clan wealth and power, but it remained the task of the cardinal-nephew, Scipione, to use these newfound riches to secure for the Borghese a permanent position among the Roman aristocracy, one that would outlast the temporary glories of St. Peter's throne. The acquisition of land and titles, the arrangement of marriage alliances, and the conspicuous display of artistic patronage were essential to social ascent. Forming collections of fine works of art was central to the projection of aristocratic identity. By emulating ancient Roman rituals of villeggiatura and the collecting practices often associated with villa life, as they did at their Pincian estate, the Borghese demonstrated not only their wealth but also their sophistication, taste, and erudition. A collection of antiquities that featured classical gods, heroes, and rulers reinforced Borghese claims to ancient Roman, rather than Sienese, ancestry.

More generally Marcantonio IV came of age at a time when the position of the Borghese family, and that of the Roman aristocracy, was uneasy. After two centuries of prosperity, sustained by their extensive rural landholdings, the Borghese faced a series of setbacks as financial crises swept the Italian peninsula. By renovating the Villa Borghese, Marcantonio hoped to bolster the family image, to reaffirm its nobility and romanitas. Asprucci's project included the redecoration of the walls, floors, and ceilings of the casino, as well as the reinstallation of a large group of antiquities on the ground floor. This collection, mainly formed by Cardinal Scipione in the early decades of the seventeenth century, remained in place very briefly. In 1807 Marcantonio's heir, Camillo, sold the majority of the antiquities to Napoleon for the Louvre. Despite Camillo's attempts to retrieve his collection after the fall of Napoleon, many jewels, such as the Borghese Gladiator, remain in Paris today.

Beautifully illustrated with fifty-eight halftones and twelve color plates, Paul's book, published by the Getty Research Institute to accompany an exhibition mounted in the summer of 2000, reconstructs Asprucci's important, but little studied, renovation of the Borghese casino. The exhibition featured a group of preparatory drawings held by the Getty, which Paul used to analyze Asprucci's decorative scheme and to reconstruct the placement of the antiquities prior to their removal to the Louvre. Paul's long essay is accompanied by a catalog of drawings (a selection from a larger cache pertaining to the renovation) and by a short essay by Alberta Campitelli that describes Marcantonio's commission for a second museum, the Museo di Gabii, which was designed to house antiquities discovered during excavations at a nearby Borghese property in the countryside.

Paul demonstrates that Asprucci devised a decorative ensemble for the ground floor rooms of the casino that was exceptionally cohesive in both form and content. Asprucci unified walls embellished with architectural motifs, stucco bas-reliefs, gilded decorations, painted panels, heraldic devices, and niches for statuary with rich marble pavements and ceilings decorated with narrative frescoes, and he tied the decorations thematically to the statuary that he selected for each room. The result was a visual panegyric that glorified the Borghese as descendants of the ancient Romans, in particular the great founders of the city, while offering lessons to future progeny, such as the young Camillo, in princely virtues. Although the practice of collecting and the creation of statuary programs that made genealogical claims were deeply rooted in Renaissance villa life, as Paul shows in the first section of her essay, Asprucci's ensemble had no direct precedents and played a significant role in the rise of the modern public museum, in particular the Louvre. Paul notes that coordinated decorative programs were relatively common in baroque Italy prior to Asprucci's design for the Borghese casino, especially fresco cycles designed to unify suites of rooms. However permanent decorations and moveable objects meant for display had never been fully integrated. Those models that did exist for Asprucci's design, such as the Casino Albani in Rome, lacked both the tight formal unity and the thematic complexity achieved at the Villa Borghese.

The Louvre was the first public art museum in France. Napoleon not only acquired the lion's share of the Borghese collection of antiquities, but he also employed the former Borghese antiquarian, Ennio Quirinio Visconti, to supervise the installation of antiquities there. In Paris, as in the Borghese casino in Rome, the decoration of museum spaces was integrated with the exhibition of precious objects; specifically, ceiling decorations and groupings of statuary were connected thematically. A formally unified scheme also served a didactic purpose. But, rather than serving the political and social aspirations of a princely dynasty, it was redeployed, writes Paul, "for the education of the ideal citizen, and the glory that the prince's museum had accrued to the noble patron instead redounded to the state" (p. 88). Paris was portrayed as the new Rome, the center of Western art and civilization in the modern world.

In concluding her essay, Paul highlights the broader museological significance of the scheme Asprucci devised for the Borghese. In the late eighteenth century, an enlightened patron and his architect succeeded, for the first time, in creating a princely display of antiquities that anticipated many of the guiding principles of modern museums, including the necessity of providing ample lighting, of arranging well organized installations, and of designing coordinated programs meant both to please and to instruct. Paul's book is essential reading for all those interested in this important transition from the princely collection to the public museum.