Galleria Borghese

Gravel crunches under your shoes as you cross toward the villa. Umbrella pines lean overhead, and their resin hangs in the warm air. Then the pale facade appears, with its statues and niches, almost too neat for a park. Inside, the noise of Rome falls away. You hear footsteps on marble, a lowered voice, and the soft click of a door. Welcome to the Galleria Borghese, one of the most personal collections of art anywhere in the world.

This building was never meant to be a museum. In the early seventeenth century, Cardinal Scipione Borghese built it as a villa for pleasure, a place to entertain guests and show off his treasures. Scipione was the nephew of Pope Paul V, and in papal Rome that family tie brought enormous wealth and power. He used both freely. The house you are standing in was, in a real sense, a showroom for one man's appetite for beauty.

And what an appetite it was. Scipione collected ancient statues, Renaissance paintings, and the work of living artists who were still young and unproven. He did not always collect politely. In 1608, Raphael's Deposition, an altarpiece that shows Christ's body being carried to the tomb, disappeared from a church in Perugia at night. It came to Rome, and into Scipione's hands. The painting still hangs here today, upstairs in the picture gallery.

Here is the first surprise most visitors miss. The cardinal's most famous painter, Caravaggio, arrived in this collection partly through confiscation. When the painter known as the Cavalier d'Arpino got into legal trouble, his collection of paintings was seized, and some of Caravaggio's early works came to the Borghese family this way. Among them, according to the usual account, was Boy with a Basket of Fruit. Look at the leaves in that basket. Some are fresh, and some are already yellow and curling.

Caravaggio fills one room on the ground floor, and he does not flatter anyone. In Sick Bacchus, the god of wine has greenish skin and grey lips. Many scholars think the young painter used himself as the model while he was ill. Later, in David with the Head of Goliath, the severed head belongs to a tired, ruined face. That face is widely read as Caravaggio's own self-portrait, painted when he was a fugitive. He was hoping for a papal pardon at the time.

Now turn to the sculpture, because this is where the house becomes famous. Scipione gave a teenage Gian Lorenzo Bernini some of his first major commissions. Bernini was barely in his twenties, and the cardinal gave him blocks of marble and great freedom. The result is a series of figures that seem to move. They do not stand still on their pedestals. They twist, run, and fight in the middle of the room.

Find Apollo and Daphne. The story comes from Ovid, the Roman poet. Apollo chases the nymph Daphne, and she prays for escape. Just as he reaches her, she turns into a laurel tree. Walk slowly around the group. From one side you see a chase. From another, bark is closing over her legs. Her fingers are becoming thin leaves, and her toes are pushing out as roots. The marble is so fine at the edges that light passes through it.

In another room stands The Rape of Proserpina, showing Pluto, god of the underworld, carrying off a young woman. It is a violent scene, and Bernini does not soften it. Look closely at Pluto's hand on her thigh. His fingers press into her skin, and the marble seems to give way like flesh. It is hard to believe this is stone. At his feet, the three-headed dog Cerberus guards the entrance to the underworld.

Then there is Bernini's David. Michelangelo's David in Florence stands calm before the fight. This David is caught in action, twisting his body to hurl the stone from his sling. He bites his lower lip in concentration. Legend has it that Bernini carved the face from his own reflection in a mirror, with the cardinal himself holding it. Whether the story is true or not, the expression feels like a real person caught in one moment.

The second surprise sits in a room of its own. She is a woman reclining on a marble couch, half undressed, holding an apple. This is Pauline Bonaparte, the sister of Napoleon, carved by Antonio Canova in the early nineteenth century. She had married into the Borghese family. Canova presented her as Venus, the goddess of love, which caused a scandal. Look at the mattress beneath her. The stone shows creases, dents, and the soft weight of a body.

That marriage had a cost. Pauline's husband, Prince Camillo Borghese, sold a large part of the family's ancient sculpture to his brother-in-law Napoleon. Hundreds of works went to Paris, and many are still in the Louvre today. So the classical statues you see here are partly replacements, gathered after the sale. Then in 1902, the Italian state bought the villa and its collection, and the private house finally became a public museum.

Now climb the stairs to the upper floor, where the paintings hang close together under painted ceilings. Here you will find Raphael's Deposition, and Titian's Sacred and Profane Love, with two women sitting at a stone fountain. One is richly dressed, and one is almost naked. Scholars still argue about what the painting means. Notice how the rooms themselves are decorated. The marble, gilding, and ceiling frescoes were designed as part of the experience, not as a background.

When your visit ends and you step back outside, pause for a moment on the terrace. The pines are still there. The gravel still crunches. Behind you, Daphne is still turning into a tree, Pluto is still gripping Proserpina, and Pauline is still resting on her stone pillows. They have been doing this for centuries, in the same house a cardinal built for his own pleasure. Now take a slow walk into the park, and let your eyes adjust to ordinary daylight again.