Florentine school wpe3B.jpg (835 byte)

This room is situated on the First Floor
borghese23.gif (27344 byte) In the entrance-hall one can see a famous parchment dated 1636, which shows the villa in the time of Cardinal Scipione.The pictures on the walls are very unusual. Af first they look like paintings, actually they were made by Marcello Provenzale using the technique of miniature patchwork. The most important among them is the portrait of Pope PaulV.

Villa Borgese (parchment)
Room No. 9 is famous for Raphael’s masterpiece Jesus Christ Deposition (1507). Originally, it was exhibited in a church in Perugia in remembrance of the prematurely dead son of Atalanta Baglioni, a Perugian nobleman. In 1608, Pope Paul V ordered the stealing of the painting (it was done by night) and grave it as a present to his nephew the Cardinal, who included it in his collection.

Two oval portraits of Child Jesus’ Worship reveal the evolution of Tuscan Art at the beginning of the I 6th century, influenced by Leonardo da Vinci’s discovery of perspective: Among the paintings which show this influence one can see The Portrait of a Man by the painter Schauffelein (a pupil of Durer) and the ceiling painted by Anton Van Maron, which tells the story of Enea and Didone.

liocorno1.jpg (5942 byte)The room exhibits two other famous Raphael's paintings: The Portrait of a Man,- originally ascribed to the painter Perugino, who was Raphael’s teacher,and The Lady with the Unicorn (1506). All the paintings in this room belong to the Umbrian and Tuscan School (1400-1500). The most remarkable is The Crucifix with St. Christopher and St. Girolamo painted by Bernardino di Betto or "Pinturicchio", in 1471.

DIDASCALIA: The Unicorn Mystery

The presence of the unicorn perhaps determined the decision to change the lady of the portrait, painted by Raphael, into Saint Katherine.
A new repair has revealed the original painting which shows, under the heavy clothes of the saint, the velvets and the expensive jewels of a Renaissance lady with the mythological animaI. Nevertheless, nobody knows her identity.