The Touch of Pygmalion. Rubens and Sculpture in Rome

Borghese Gallery, Rome

With a corpus of over 50 works, loaned from prestigious museums and international collections such as the British Museum, the Louvre, the Met, the Morgan Library, the National Gallery of London, the National Gallery of Washington, the Prado, and the Rijksmuseum of Amsterdam, the exhibition “The Touch of Pygmalion. Rubens and Sculpture in Rome” has been inaugurated.

The event highlights the love of the Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens (Siegen, 1577-Antwerp, 1640) for the multifaceted heritage of the great sculptors of the Italian Renaissance providing an exceptional contribution to a new representation of the ancient, reformulating it through an updated study of nature, thus rising as a prominent figure and precursor schoolmaster of Baroque art.

RUBENS! The Birth of European Painting

The exhibition is part of RUBENS! The Birth of European Painting, a project of the Roman museum – in collaboration with Palazzo Te and Palazzo Ducale di Mantova – dedicated to the cultural relationships between Italy and Europe in the 16th century as seen through the eyes of the Flemish Master.

Across the two floors of the museum, prestigious series of masterpieces (including paintings, drawings, and sketches) are arranged in a journey divided into eight sections. The dialogue between the masterpieces of Italian masters and the paintings of Rubens highlights “the small distance that divides the two disciplines“, as noted by the director of the Borghese Gallery Francesca Cappelletti, and the development of “a new grammar of the body that has influenced modern sculpture“, explains the curator Lucia Simonato.

Pictorial Sculpture

Rubens has been recognised as one of the greatest connoisseurs of Rome’s glorious history. The exhibition highlighted his process of ‘animating the antique‘, enlivening subjects and scenarios through his innovative art.

Rubens’s pictorial sculpture also expresses itself in the exploration of movement, a language with common roots that captivated the Flemish artist through his admiration for masters he had studied and admired such as Michelangelo and Caravaggio.

An engaging overview of that fantastic artistic season catapults us into the close connection between Rubens’s paintings and drawings with the major groups of Gianlorenzo Bernini, as well as ancient and modern sculptures, including works by foreign artists.

Hours:
9:00 AM – 7:00 PM; last entry at 5:45 PM. Closed on Mondays.

Prices:
Full: €16 – Reduced: €5