Day 16 - Galleria Borghese

March 26, 2019

It was finally time for our guided tour of the Borghese Gallery. We'd done everything on the IPhone and weren't sure how we were supposed to meet up with the tour. We also learned that the Gallery takes in a complete new set of visitors every two hours. Once your time is up, you must leave the museum. 

We found our guide (or she found us) and she told us to wait while she looked for other members of our group. The waiting area had a few distractions to keep us occupied.

Our guide found the remaining people and we ventured into the Gallery. She was an Art History major and really knew her stuff. She was also very soft-spoken.

At first we were looking at everything, such as this small statue with a big name:
"The Goat Amalthea with the Infant Jupiter and a Faun", the earliest work by Italian sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini.

This painting is entitled Leda and the Swan and as painted by Giovanni Antonio Bazzi, who went by the alias Il Sodoma.

The guide now led us to an amazing sculpture titled "Ratto di Proserpina" which translates to "Rape of Proserpina". It was created by Gian Lorenzo Bernini and depicts where Proserpina is seized and taken to the underworld by the god Pluto.

The guide spoke at great length about the work, circling the sculpture to show the detail from all sides.

Next to David in Florence, this was the most impressive work of art that I saw.

Another Bernini work, which was also very good, was Apollo and Daphne. It depicts the climax of the story of Apollo and Daphne (Phoebus and Daphne) in Ovid's Metamorphoses.

This is Bernin's take on David, quite different from Michelangelo's.

This next work is by Antonio Canova and depicts Paolina Borghese Bonaparte.

By this point we were in the last 30 minutes of the tour and taking photos of interesting items, some of which remain unidentified. Edith took this one of the museum floor.

Various statues:

One of the primary reasons Edith wanted to come here was to see the works by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. It was 4:35, so we only had 25 minutes left. We asked the guide and she herded the group to that part of the museum.

This one is titled Young Sick Bacchus and is a self-portrait.

The lights were bright in this area and there were reflections on some of the paintings.

The bottom work is titled "St. Jerome Writing", not sure about the top one.

This next one is "Madonna and child with St. Anne".

And here's one last look at a Bernini and the alarm bells were ringing to get us out of the gallery.

I took one last photo in the park.

And then we had dinner on the Piazza del Popolo.

In the morning we'd be boarding the train for Venice.