Palazzo Borghese
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Palazzo Borghese is the main seat of the Borghese family in Rome; it was nicknamed il Cembalo ("the harpsichord") due to its unusual trazezoidal groundplan; its short front (illustration) faces the Tiber. Its "keyboard" entrance facade on the opposite end faces the Fontanella di Borghese, with a great flanking facade in Piazza Borghese and a slightly angled extension down via Borghese to the river.
Howard Hibbard demonstrated[1] that the nine-bay section of palazzo was begun in 1560/61 for Monsignor Tomasso del Giglio, whose arms remain over the door in Piazza Borghese, and he suggests that the architect was Vignola, an attribution accepted by Anthony Blunt[2] and considered conclusive by James S. Ackerman[3] followed by other scholars since, with more or less reduced interventions by Longhi. Before Tomasso del Giglio died in 1578, the façade and the unique but undocumented double-columned two-storey arcade of the courtyard had been established, a conceptual scheme of Vignola's, Hibbard suggested, but which was carried out in 1575-78 by Martino Longhi the Elder. Longhi was retained by Pedro Cardinal Deza, who bought the property in 1587, but seems to have done little more than continue the great courtyard.
Cardinal Camillo Borghese purchased the structure in 1604 and assembled further adjacent properties toward the river.[4] When the Cardinal became Pope Paul V in 1605, he gave the palazzo to his brothers but continued to commission the work, which was carried forward vigorously, at first by Flaminio Ponzio, and completed after Ponzio's death in 1613 by Carlo Maderno and Giovanni Vasanzio. Ponzio stretched the square courtyard to five by seven bays and was responsible for the secondary façade with two further balconies on the Via di Ripetta, facing the Tiber River.
In 1671-76 Carlo Rainaldi added new features for Prince Giovan Battista Borghese; the most extensive changes were made on the newly raised ground floor of the long wing extending towards the Tiber, ending with river views, which the Borghese found the most congenial dwelling spaces: Rainaldi added the columnar loggia to Ponzi's end facade (illustration, right), and on the interior a richly stuccoed oval chapel, and the narrow barrel-vaulted galleria, the highly-charged Cortonesque decorative details of which were designed by Giovan Francesco Grimaldi (1606-1680).[5]
The main façades of three stories with two mezzanines inserted between them, heach has amajestic portal flanked by columns and a balcony. Through one portale, a view across the courtyard gives a perspective view to one of the wall-fountains in the garden beyond.
The edifice has a magnificent inner court of high-arched shape, surrounded by 96 granite columns and decorated with statues, and a nympheum and other features, as well as an enclosed garden with three niche wall-fountains built to designs by Johann Paul Schor finished by Rainaldi, for Prince Giovan Battista Borghese and finished in 1673.[6] The court was described as "one of the most spectacular existing, not only in Rome"[7].
The secondary façade on the square of the Fontanella Borghese is faces another Borghese palace, rebuilt in the 16th century by Scipio Borghese to house the lesser members of the family, the stables and the servants.
Palazzo Borghese was the original seat of the family's art collection, with works by Raphael, Titian and many others, transferred in 1891 to the Galleria Borghese in Villa Borghese.
[edit] Notes
- ^ Hibbard, The Palazzo Borghese (Rome:American Academy) 1962. Former attributions were to Martino Longhi the Elder, an architect who did not show such imagination and vitality elsewhere, and who was not yet in Rome in 1560-61.
- ^ Reviewing Hibbard 1962 in The Burlington Magazine 105 No. 729 (December 1963), p 566.
- ^ Reviewing Hibbar 1962 in The Art Bulletin 45.2 (June 1963), pp. 163-164,
- ^ This was a sixteenth-century structure owned by the Farnese, accounting for the kink in the facade.
- ^ This transverse galleria was not the former Picture Gallery in the palazzo. (Howard Hibbard, "Palazzo Borghese Studies - II: The Galleria" The Burlington Magazine 104 No. 706 (January 1962), pp. 9-20.)
- ^ Howard Hibbard, "Palazzo Borghese Studies I: The Garden and Its Fountains" The Burlington Magazine 100 No. 663 (June 1958), pp. 204-212, 215.
- ^ Zeppegno, cited in [1].
[edit] References
- Fischer, Heinz-Joachim (2001). Rom. Zweieinhalb Jahrtausende Geschichte, Kunst und Kultur der Ewigen Stadt. Cologne: DuMont Buchverlag.
- Henze, Anton (1994). Kunstführer Rom. Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam.
- Rendina, Claudio (1999). Enciclopedia di Roma. Rome: Newton Compton.
- Hibbard, Howard. (1962) The Palazzo Borghese (Rome: American Academy) Biographies of Longhi and Ponzio are in appendices.
- Touring Club Italiano, (1965)Roma e Dintorni
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