Borghese Gallery launches fundraiser to restore Roman mosaics with hunting scenes and gladiators

The Borghese Gallery is launching a new €50,000 fundraiser for the restoration of three of five mosaic panels from a Roman villa of the imperial era.

The panels, located in the Mariano Rossi hall, decorated the peristyle portico in the Roman villa as a long narrative frieze. When the mosaic was discovered, Prince Francesco Borghese Aldobrandini ordered its removal and transfer to his Villa Borghese residence.

The restoration, preceded by anextensive campaign of physicalinvestigations to define the state of conservation of the underlying layers and the technical methods of laying the mosaic tesserae, aims to restore unity at both the material and perceptual levels of theentire floor mosaic, an important example of historical restoration and the reuse of ancient mosaics in new floor contexts.

The conservation intervention will see the reestablishment of the cohesion and adhesion of the bedding mortar of the mosaic tesserae to the preparatory layers and the restoration of the correct color relationship between the elements, compromised by substances applied in previous interventions, now altered.

The three panels depict scenes of hunting and gladiatorial combat. One, in polychrome mosaic tiles, depicts two different scenes. On the left seven men face a large bull; six are fallen and wounded in the clash; the seventh, wounded, holds the animal. On the right two warriors clash against a group of animals, a bull, an ostrich, an elk and a deer. One of the two figures, placed in the foreground, pierces a lion with a spear.

A second panel depicts on two planes a panther hunting scene, with polychrome tiles on a white monochrome background; a third mosaic panel depicts on different perspective planes some gladiatorial scenes and a panther hunt.

The use of depictions of munera and venationes in private buildings spread in the late second century CE to celebrate the virtutes of the master of the house.

Borghese Gallery launches fundraiser to restore Roman mosaics with hunting scenes and gladiators

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