Getty Research Institute

Alberta Campitelli

Carole Paul

Antonio Asprucci

In 1775 Prince Marcantonio Borghese IV and the architect Antonio Asprucci embarked upon a decorative renovation of the Villa Borghese. Initially their attention focused on the Casino, the principal building at the villa, which had always been a semi-public museum. By 1625 it housed much of the Borghese's outstanding collection of sculpture. Integrating this statuary with vast baroque ceiling paintings and richly ornamented surfaces, Asprucci created a dazzling and unified homage to the Borghese family, portraying its legendary ancestors as well as its newly born heir. In this book, Carole Paul reads the inventive decorative program as a set of exemplary scenes for the education of the ideal Borghese prince. Her wide-ranging essay also situates the Villa Borghese among the sumptuous palaces and suburban villas of Rome's collectors of antiquities and outlines the renovated Casino's pivotal role in the historic transition from the princely collection to the public museum. Rounding out this volume is a catalog of the Getty Research Institute's fifty-nine drawings for the refurbishing of the Villa Borghese and Alberta Campitelli's discussion of sketches for the short-lived Museo di Gabii, the Villa's other antiquities museum.

Drawings for the Late-eighteenth-century Redecoration of the Villa Borghese

Making a Prince's Museum

The inspiration for virtually all of RomeGÇÖs famous gardens, the Vatican Gardens first flourished during the Middle Ages and have awed visitors ever since. Yet despite their importance to the history of Western gardens and art, no full-length study of the gardens has previously been published. With the release of The Vatican GardensGÇöthe third in a series co-published with the Vatican that also includes The Sistine Chapel: A New Vision and The Loggia of Raphael: A Vatican Art TreasureGÇöthese important gardens have at last received their full due. Covering the period from the thirteenth century through 1930, when the Vatican became a state, The Vatican Gardens explores the plants, planters, and architectural structures of the gardens in fascinating detail. Here you will learn about such celebrated gardeners as Michele Mercate, who around 1570 introduced the rarest plants of his time to the Vatican, and the great botanist Johannes Faber. The famous Cortile del Belvedere courtyard, designed by Donato Branmante for Pope Julius II and envisioned as a vast outdoor room, is brought to vibrant life through word and image. Discussion of the GardensGÇÖ symbolic significance, agricultural functions, and upkeep by such gardening popes as Leo XIIIGÇöas well as of the gardens at Castel Gandolfo, the pope's four-centuries-old summer residenceGÇöcompletes this authoritative volume. Illustrated throughout with newly commissioned images and plans as well as historic pictures and diagrams, and featuring research thatGÇöamong much elseGÇöestablishes the Vatican Gardens as the oldest botanical garden in Italy, this original volume belongs in the libraries of landscape gardeners, architects, historians, and visitors to Rome.

Alberta Campitelli

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