Rome, Borghese Gallery presents exhibitions 2022: Guido Reni, Titian and stone painting

The Galleria Borghese in Rome today presented the Galleria Borghese’s 2022 exhibition program, focused on three main appointments, three exhibitions devoted respectively to Guido Reni, Titian, and stone painting in Rome in the seventeenth century.

“Next year’s program,” says Galleria Borghese director Francesca Cappelletti, “focuses on the relationship between art and landscape, central to understanding the historical and even current meaning of a project such as the Baroque Villa, of which the Galleria Borghese is a splendid and still readable example. Visitors will be led to reflect on the cultural nature of landscape, on how much the surrounding environment and the materials of nature have been the inspiration and object of artists’ activity.”

The first exhibition, Guido Reni in Rome. The Sacred and Nature, curated by Francesca Cappelletti, from Feb. 9 to May 22, 2022, focuses on Guido Reni’s painting Danza campestre, which has been back in the museum’s collection for the past year, to which it had always belonged before it was sold at the end of the 19th century. The return of the painting to the rooms of the Palazzina Pinciana, alongside the other landscape paintings in the collection, offers an opportunity to reflect on the relationship of Guido Reni, a painter much loved by Scipione Borghese, with the rural subject and with landscape painting, hitherto considered extraneous to his production or at any rate very little practiced. The exhibition, moving from Guido Reni’s interest in landscape painting in relation to other Italian and foreign painters present in Rome in the early seventeenth century, will attempt to to reconstruct the early years of the artist’s Roman sojourn, his passionate study of Renaissance works and antiquity, the very important relationship woven with the Genoese banker Ottavio Costa and his stunner with respect to the highly chiaroscuro painting of Caravaggio (whom Reni knew and frequented, as surmised by Carlo Cesare Malvasia in Felsina pittrice of 1678 and as recently found documents have confirmed) and the beginning of his dazzling career as a great history painter.

The second exhibition, Titian. Dialogues of Nature and Love, from June 15 to Sept. 18, 2022, curated by Maria Giovanna Sarti, is a dossier exhibition that was created on the occasion of the loan granted by the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna of Titian’s Nymph with Shepherd, as part of a cultural exchange program between the two institutions. The encounter between the Vienna canvas and the Titians of the Galleria Borghese creates an opportunity to put the works in dialogue around some themes always present in the painter’s production, a red thread that from the beginnings leads to the extreme epigones of his activity: Nature, understood as a signifying landscape and place of human action; and Love, returned in its different forms, of divine, natural, matrimonial love, personified by Venus or a Nymph, by a girl at a very young age or a bride. Nature and Love are closely linked and part of the cycle of Life, in a harmonious relationship alluded to by the amorous and musical allegory of the Nymph with shepherd. This is the last episode in a recurrence initiated by the very first Titian with the Three Ages of Man (Edinburgh), proposed here in the replica by Sassoferrato, who during the seventeenth century copied, in all likelihood precisely for the Borghese family, a version present in Rome of Titian’s painting, and stands as a testimony to the extent to which precisely these themes of Love and Nature were appreciated and in demand at the important Roman princely collections.

Finally, the third exhibition, Timeless Wonder. Painting on Stone in Rome in the Seventeenth Century, curated by Francesca Cappelletti and Patrizia Cavazzini, from October 25, 2022 to January 29, 2023, is dedicated to painting on stone, its developments and its historical and semantic implications during the seventeenth century, within a research path that began in 2021 with an in-depth study of the research on nature and landscape within the collection.Among the consequences of the Sack of Rome should also be counted Sebastiano del Piombo’s invention of painting on stone. Desperate for the loss of many paintings during the long siege of the city by the Landsknechts, the Venetian-born painter, in the circle of Agostino Chigi in Rome since the first decade of the century, would in fact decisively undertake, in the wake of the drama, the practice of painting on media other than canvas and more resistant to danger and time. The declination of stone painting within the museum, which still contains to a very large extent the works collected by Scipione Borghese in the first three decades of the seventeenth century and their initial placement, poses considerable elements of interest. Indeed, the change of context, with respect to Sebastiano del Piombo’s “invention” and Florentine painting of the second half of the sixteenth century, will be able to provoke giddiness and reflection in the public, just as in the mid-seventeenth century the impact of the collection aroused wonder and amazement. One component of this dizziness was undoubtedly the diversity of materials used in the works of art and their proximity to the natural space of the gardens and park, which surrounded the Villa. The relationship between art and nature was also carried into the interior of the rooms, with the display of sculptures, paintings, objects and works that stood in an intermediate situation, almost of metamorphosis, between the various arts. Through the use of marbles and metals, paintings could compete with sculptures in their ability to overcome time or reinforce, for example, the idea that a portrait, executed to make the memory of a character lasting, could indeed be transferred through the magic of art to a world far removed from the transience of forms. In Rome, these instances, the basis of the success of stone painting in the 16th century, are further invigorated by the observation of antiquity: colored marbles and very rare examples of Roman stone painting will complement and make the itinerary even more spectacular.

In addition, as of January 4, 2022, the museum is inaugurating the paintings down the stairs initiative to highlight paintings that do not find a daily place in the exhibition itinerary and are kept in the Gallery’s storage rooms, located above the exhibition floors. These are about fifteen works that will enrich the exhibition on a rotating basis for about a month. Small paintings with figures and landscapes, on canvas or panel, but also copper, mainly from the Flemish school but not only. Of note is the nucleus of women painters, including Lucia Anguissola’s Portrait of a Lady, probably a portrait of her sister Sofonisba, also a painter.

In 2022 the Borghese Gallery also activated a collaboration with the Egyptian Museum in Turin. In fact, on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the first decipherment of hieroglyphics by French Egyptologist Jean-François Champollion and British Thomas Young, on September 21, the Egyptian room of the Galleria Borghese will host a stele from the Turin museum. The work will be flanked by a multimedia panel that will present the stele in relation to the Egyptian room in which it is temporarily placed; a room that celebrated Egyptian antiquity in a way that was still fanciful but emblematic of the fascination that the art and writing of Egypt had exerted in Rome from the Renaissance until the studies of the brilliant Jesuit Athanasius Kircher in the 1600s.

Pictured is Titian’s Nymph with Shepherd.

Rome, Borghese Gallery presents exhibitions 2022: Guido Reni, Titian and stone painting

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