[above is a bust of Scipione Borghese - please see the comments for information about the sculptor]

Galleria Borghese is named for the man who put most of the gallery’s collection together - the man who owned the property and building where the art is housed. His original name was Scipione Caffarelli and he was the nephew of Pope Paul V (originally named Camillo Borghese). This pope made Scipione into a cardinal, at which point he earned the right to take on the Borghese family name and coat of arms. He was then known as Cardinal Scipione Borghese and acted as the pope’s secretary. This position and proximity to the pope gave Cardinal Borghese tremendous power, a power that he used and abused to put together what is now one of the world’s renowned art collections.

The gallery does not try to hide this fact. In the gallery a description of Borghese states that he used his powers to confiscate art works or to force people to make donations. A history of the Borghese gallery I found online seems to mirror a sign I read in the gallery. It reads:

The collection’s character was influenced by the capricious nature of its owner who had little love of affairs of state and was more inclined to indulge his personal whims and, above all, his passion for art. The original core is characterised by Scipione’s interest in every form of antique and Classical art - to be exclusion of medieval works - and his openness to the most innovative artistic movements of his times. Its richness was the result of unscrupulous appropriation and tyrannical extortion by the “cardinal nepote” leading the inclusion of the collection of the Cavalier D’Arpino with paintings by Caravaggio, of Domenichino’s Diana (1613), of the paintings from the Ferrara School including works by Garofalo and Dosso Dossi, and Raphael’s Deposition (1507). These were joined by gifts and acquisitions such as the antique sculptures of Tiberio Ceuli (1607), the collections of the sculptor Giovanni Battista della Porta (1608), of the Patriarch of the Aquileia (1609), of Cesare d’Este with paintings by Dosso (acquired with the help of Cardinal E. Bentivoglio, and of Cardinal Sfondrato 1608, with Ventian works by Titian and G. Reni).

In a sense, as I understand it, being a cardinal and the pope’s nephew conferred upon Cardinal Borghese the power of ‘eminent domain‘ and he used it ruthlessly. People have used state power to do things that are a lot worse than amassing great art collections - but reading about this theft and plunder early on our trip left me pondering the degree to which the abuse of state power may have contributed to all the wonders we were seeing.