The exhibition featuring Raphael, Bernini and other masters captures a pivotal moment in Italian art
In 1607, over a hundred paintings were seized from the Roman painter Cavaliere d’Arpino, arrested on a weapons charge, and handed over to Cardinal Scipione Borghese by papal order. The cardinal may have had an unorthodox way of building his collection, but he certainly had an eye for contemporary talent and ultimately assembled one of the greatest bodies of work in Italian history. Today, the Borghese Gallery comprises roughly 800 paintings and 100 sculptures, and – in a rare offsite event – a selection of them is currently on show in Cuneo, at the Monumental Complex of San Francesco until 29 March.
Titled La Galleria Borghese. Da Raffaello a Bernini. Storia di una collezione (The Borghese Gallery: From Raphaël to Bernini: History of a Collection), the show spans well over a century of Italian art, underpinned by a theme of capturing an artist at a turning point. In fact, art itself evolved radically over this period, from late Renaissance to early Baroque.
Instead of using a chronological approach, the curators Francesca Cappelletti and Ettore Giovanati smartly organised the works around the great regional schools of Italian painting:
Titian’s Portrait of a Dominican Friar, painted around 1565, opens the Venetian sequence. He was in his late seventies, working with rapid, almost impressionistic brushstrokes that his contemporaries scarcely knew what to make of. Jacopo Bassano’s Autumn and Spring take the same tradition somewhere earthier, into seasons and fields and the unglamorous rhythms of peasant life.
Tiziano Vecellio
Ritratto di frate domenicano (San Domenico)
ca. 1565/1569
olio su tela
© Galleria Borghese / foto Mauro Coen
From Central Italy come two works a century apart. The portrait attributed to Raphael, painted around 1500, has the lucid formal precision that made his school the model for generations. It was the Renaissance at its most assured, a tradition so complete it became the standard every painter after him had to reckon with. Cavaliere d’Arpino was one of those painters: by 1595, when he painted his Flight into Egypt on copper, he had refined the Renaissance idiom almost to exhaustion. Incidentally, he was the one whose works were seized and handed over to Scipione…
Battista Dossi’s Holy Family moves in the opposite direction, the Ferrara school reaching toward a lyricism that the Renaissance had no language for. Its tender forms and softened light hint at the emotional depths that would soon bloom in full Baroque expression.
Lavinia Fontana
Il sonno di Gesù
1591
olio su rame
© Galleria Borghese / foto Mauro Coen
Lavinia Fontana’s Sleep of the Infant Jesus, painted in 1591 for Camillo Borghese, the future Pope Paul V, shows the child John with a finger to his lips beside the sleeping Christ. Fontana was the first woman in the history of Western art to build a career entirely on commissions; her husband abandoned his own practice to manage the household and act as her agent while she worked for the most powerful patrons in Rome. Scipione followed her work closely and acquired three of her paintings – remarkable proof that, in a patriarchal society, talent mattered more to him than gender.
Guido Reni
Danza Campestre
ca. 1601/1602
olio su tela
© Galleria Borghese / foto Mauro Coen
Guido Reni’s Country Dance fills the room with movement and sound: ladies and peasants gathered in a circle among the trees, a young man coaxing a woman into the dance, lute and viola da braccio playing somewhere just beyond the frame, the sky behind them beginning to cloud over.
Bernini, who rang in the Baroque era, closes the show in two registers: the Goat Amalthea, carved in 1615 when he was around seventeen, one of his earliest known works in marble; and beside it the Self-Portrait at Mature Age, showing the man whose talent Scipione had recognised as an adolescent, already fully formed in his own authority.
The cardinal was one of the greatest art patrons of his time, holding the established and the radical in the same gaze. His vision was to turn the Villa Borghese into a theatre of beauty and knowledge, and he accomplished it… even if sometimes with dubious means.
Photo © Danilo Ninotto
Photo © Danilo Ninotto
The collection rarely leaves Rome. That it can be seen today in a former conventual church in Piedmont is due in large part to Fondazione CRC (Cassa di Risparmio di Cuneo), which funded the restoration of the Complesso Monumentale di San Francesco in 2011 and has since built one of the more ambitious exhibition projects in northern Italy. Following shows that featured, among many others, Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese, Galleria Borghese – from Raphael to Bernini is the most ambitious one yet. The companion programme includes concerts, workshops, guided visits and thematic events that signal a cultural project with genuine ambition, not a one-off prestige loan.
The Monumental Complex itself is a venue worth visiting. Franciscan friars settled here, likely as early as the 13th century. From the 15th century onward, it became the beating heart of Cuneo’s citizenry. Now housing the Civic Museum of Cuneo, this former convent and the adjoining church are classified as a national monument and a rare architectural testimony of the medieval era in the city.
Photo © Danilo Ninotto
Collections outlast their collectors. Scipione’s politics, his papacy, his century have all receded. What remains are the choices he made in front of works that his contemporaries walked past. He gave aspiring artists a chance. They produced what in their era was considered novel and modern art; today it hangs in international museums all over the world. See for yourself: this fine exhibition in the idyllic town of Cuneo is well worth the short two-hour drive from the French Riviera.
VISITOR INFORMATION
The Borghese Gallery: From Raphaël to Bernini: History of a Collection
Complesso Monumentale di San Francesco, Cuneo | Until 29 March 2026
Opening hours: Tuesday–Friday 15:30–19:30, Saturday–Sunday 10:00–19:30
Free admission
VENUE DETAILS
Complesso Monumentale di San Francesco
Via Santa Maria 10
12100 Cuneo CN
Italy
PHOTO CREDITS
- All images courtesy the exhibition organisers and as credited
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