In Rome the Borghese looks ahead, in April Caravaggio

(ANSA) - ROME, MARCH 09 - To date, like all museums in Italy, it is closed due to the coronavirus decree. But the Borghese Gallery in Rome, the most famous and refined museum with the largest collection of Caravaggio in the world, set up in the superb rooms of the villa of delights that belonged to Cardinal Scipione Borghese, does not stop and works on a super exhibition scheduled for 29 April. "It is our duty to continue to work and plan," the combative director Anna Coliva tells ANSA, "we hope that the announcement of this exhibition for late spring will bring us luck, ours also wants to be a message of hope".
On the other hand, the theme is fascinating and at the same time important, because it will also serve to present to the public and to the audience of scholars the methodological structure that is the basis of the Caravaggio Research Institute project, launched by the Gallery which obtained support from Fendi for this. of 900 thousand euros. It is an international project - the first of its kind in Italy dedicated to a great name in the history of art - aimed essentially at scholars, connoisseurs, experts, and which has the fundamental objective of developing an integrated digital platform in which they will be poured all known documentary data on the entire Caravaggesque work, with the aim of becoming a primary reference point for studies on the artist. "We hope to be able to start as soon as possible - Coliva underlines - it is a project that should employ twenty researchers a year, with the current budget, but which we hope to expand".
Dedicated to the theme of Caravaggio's lute player, the exhibition scheduled for April 29 should then have a second stop at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg from September, and could be the penultimate exhibition organized under the direction of Coliva, which after the estate will retire (the competition to replace it has already opened at Mibact).
An important exhibition, illustrates the director, who will bring for the first time in direct comparison two versions of the subject, conceived by Caravaggio in his youth and Roman years: The lute player painted for Cardinal Benedetto and the Marquis Vincenzo Giustiniani - from the Museo dell Hermitage of St. Petersburg and recently restored - it will be exhibited next to the Lute player already in Badminton House, Gloucestershire, created by Caravaggio for another very important client and patron, Cardinal Francesco Maria Del Monte.
The two versions of the lute player will be set up in the entrance hall together with the other six works by Caravaggio that are part of the museum's permanent collection. Objective, explains Coliva, "to propose a truly exceptional path of his pictorial career, ranging from the first work performed by Caravaggio to the last, which the artist had with him at the time of his death". And thanks to the completeness of this process, he says, "it will be possible to better define the chronology of the two players". Not only that: the contiguous and close presence of the two players "will allow us to examine the revolutionary pictorial method adopted by Caravaggio in the Roman period as well as to reflect on his production of replicas of the same subject". Because the Galleria Borghese, recalls the director, "has not only the highest number of Caravaggio's works in the world, but he has both the first and the last in his collection, in practice the complete paradigm ".

The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalog, edited by the museum, "planned in Italian and English as well as in Russian for the St. Petersburg stage, which will include a comparison of the results of the diagnostic investigations conducted recently on both paintings as well as a text musicological analytic that will insist on the musical pieces depicted in the two versions ". And not only that: a series of concerts for ancient lute and voice are also scheduled, engaged in performing the scores "painted" in the two copies of the Suonatori. (HANDLE).