Marcantonio IV Borghese

Prince Marcantonio IV Borghese (1730-1800) was a scion of the Borghese family of Rome. Pro-Bonaparte in sympathies, he was the father of Camillo Filippo Ludovico Borghese.

Prince Marcantonio began the recasting of his family's Rome villa and its surrounding gardens's formal garden architecture into an English landscape garden, also set out about 1775, under the guidance of the architect Antonio Asprucci, to replace the now-outdated tapestry and leather hangings and renovate the "Casina", restaging the Borghese sculptures and antiquities in a thematic new ordering that celebrated the Borghese position in Rome. The rehabilitation of the much-visited villa as a genuinely public museum in the late eighteenth century was the subject of an exhibition at the Getty Research Center, Los Angeles, in 2000, ["Making a Prince's Museum: Drawings for the Late Eighteenth-Century Redecoration of the Villa Borghese." Getty Research Institute (17 June-17 September 2000). Catalogue by Carole Paul, with an essay by Alberta Campitelli.] spurred by the Getty's acquisition of fifty-four drawings related to the project. At the same time, Marcantonio IV engaged the architect Antonio Asprucci to renovate the family villa, which had always been a semi-public museum since the 17th century. Integrating the sculptures of the Borghese collection and existing vast Baroque ceiling decors, they created a spectacular monument to the Borghese family (Paul 2000).

Marcantonio also re-ordered the sculptures in the Borghese collection around the Villa - for example, in 1785, he had Bernini's "Apollo and Daphne" moved to the centre of its room.

References