2023-11-13 19:18:18
“Pietro Paolo Rubens knew Cardinal Scipione Borghese because he mentions him in a letter as his protector, someone he could turn to when he had to speak to one of his clients to speak on a higher level.” To underline the existing bond of the great Flemish painter with the cardinal creator of the iconic collection of the Borghese Gallery is the director of the museum, Francesca Cappelletti, also curator with Lucia Simonato of the exhibition ‘The touch of Pygmalion. Rubens and sculpture in Rome’ which opens to the public tomorrow at the Galleria Borghese. This is the second stage of ‘Rubens! The birth of a European painting’, a project created in collaboration with Fondazione Palazzo Te and Palazzo Ducale of Mantua which tells the relationship between Italian culture and Europe through the eyes of the Master of Baroque painting, and is also part of a broader research of the Gallery dedicated to the moments in which Rome was, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, a cosmopolitan city.
“The idea for this exhibition was born from the two masterpieces of the Borghese Gallery, the ‘Susanna with the Elders’ and the extraordinary ‘Lamentation’, an immature painting but full of beauty and already with the ‘Pygmalion touch’, that is, the ability to Rubens to make the ancient stone depicted here in the tomb speak” says Cappelletti. From that first idea born from paintings present in the Gallery, the exhibition was born with almost 50 works from the most important museums in the world – including the British Museum, the Louvre, the Met, the Morgan Library, the National Gallery of London, the National Gallery in Washington, the Prado, the Rijksmusem in Amsterdam, just to name a few.
The exhibition is divided into 8 sections: ‘The touch of Pygmalion’ is the one that underlines the extraordinary contribution of Rubens, on the threshold of the Baroque, to a new conception of the ancient and of the concepts of natural and imitation, focusing on the novelty disruptive of his style and demonstrating how the study of ancient models constitutes a further possibility for a new world of images.
For this reason, the exhibition takes into account not only the Italian works that document the passionate and free study of ancient examples, but also his ability to reread Renaissance examples and compare himself with contemporaries, delving into new aspects and genres.
“Magnet for Northern European artists since the sixteenth century, Rubens’ Rome, between the Aldobrandini and Borghese pontificates, is the place to still study the ancient, whose masterpieces of painting are beginning to be known, with the discovery in 1601 of the Aldobrandini Wedding” underlines the director of the Borghese Gallery. “It is the moment of Annibale Carracci’s Farnese Gallery and Caravaggio’s Contarelli chapel, which stunned a generation. Through the eyes of a young foreign painter like Peter Paul Rubens we look once again – continues Cappelletti – at the experience of elsewhere , we try to reconstruct the role of collecting, and of the Borghese collection in particular, as the engine of the new language of European naturalism, which unites the research of painters and sculptors in the first decades of the century”.
As usual in the exhibitions of the Borghese Gallery, the protagonist’s works ‘dialogue’ with others by different artists: like the two versions of the bust of Scipione Borghese by Gian Lorenzo Bernini placed alongside the intense Portrait of Ludovicus Nonnius by Rubens. Or the extraordinary drawing by the Flemish artist, ‘Lion at rest’ together with the other, ‘Lionessa’, which dialogue with the terracotta sketch of ‘Lion drinking’ by Bernini in preparation for the marble group of the fountain in Piazza Navona .
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