Scipione Borghese

Scipione Borghese was made a cardinal at twenty-eight because his uncle became pope, and used thirty years of the resulting income to assemble the greatest private art collection in Europe. Paul V raised him immediately on his election in 1605 and handed him the administration of the papal states, which in practice meant the revenues; the term cardinal-nephew describes the arrangement exactly, and Scipione is the figure it is usually illustrated with. His taste, however, was genuine and precocious. He recognised Bernini as a boy and commissioned the sculptures that made him - the Aeneas, the Pluto and Proserpina, the David, and the Apollo and Daphne, all made for the Villa Borghese before the sculptor was twenty-six. He bought Caravaggio, whose work most collectors then found indecorous, and acquired more of it than anyone else. His methods were not always fastidious: he had Raphael's Deposition removed from a church in Perugia at night under a papal order, and he confiscated over a hundred paintings from the Cavaliere d'Arpino by prosecuting him for illegal possession of firearms and taking the pictures as the fine. He built the Villa Borghese outside the walls specifically to house the collection and opened it to visitors of standing, which makes it one of the earliest galleries in the modern sense. Bernini's bust of him, made twice because a crack appeared in the marble of the first, shows a fat, amused, entirely worldly man caught in the middle of speaking. The collection survives largely intact as the Galleria Borghese. He also commissioned the enlargement of the family palace and employed Domenichino, Guido Reni and Rubens. His nephew's marriage tied the Borghese to the Roman nobility permanently. The bulk of the collection was sold to the Italian state in 1902 and the villa with it.

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