[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.

The Washington Post has a front-page article titled “The New Face of Global Mormonism.”

I wonder if anyone could go through Galleria Borghese and leave without being a fan of the sculptures by Gian Lorenzo Bernini. His works are amazingly detailed and beautiful.

One of the factors at play in Rome is that you see a lot of statues/sculptures of people who are part of the Christian narrative. However, there are still a good number of pieces that reflect ancient Rome’s dedication to the gods and characters that appear in the Greek myths. Some of these statues/sculptures are at least as interesting (if not more so) than those depicting Christian stories. That may sound heretical to some. But while I’m intrigued and awed by the lives of Christian religious figures such as Peter, Paul and Mary - I still feel a strong enthusiasm for the Greek and Roman myths I read as a child. Let’s just say that a statue of Theseus beheading Medusa is going to catch my attention and interest very quickly - more quickly perhaps than a static standing figure holding a cross or a key or a sword. As I walked through Rome, at times I found myself wishing there were more of the mythology-based statues and sculptures to look at.

The Borghese Gallery has a wonderful sculpture depicting a climactic moment in the story of Apollo and Daphne. In the story, Apollo criticizes Cupid, and Cupid then starts using his arrows to create some mischief on Apollo. Consequently, the ardent Apollo is pursuing Daphne but she has no interest in him. As he is about to overcome her by force, she feels that her beauty has become a curse. She appeals to her father (a river God) that her form will be changed and he changes her into a laurel tree.

Imagine trying to sculpt a statue of a person changing into a laurel tree. That seems like it would be ridiculously hard. Bernini took on that challenge and created something that is truly beautiful. Again, the Borghese Gallery did not allow us to take photographs, so I had to pull an image from the internet.

A sculpture is, of course, a three-dimension work of art. This is one of the reasons that Michelangelo felt that sculpture was a superior art form to painting - and one of the reasons that Michelangelo expressed scorn for Leonardo da Vinci, who favored painting.

In his statue of Apollo and Daphne, Bernini uses that three-dimensional dynamic to its full potential effect. This is a sculpture of a chase - and if you approach it from the Apollo side you can see very clearly that Apollo is doing his utmost to capture her and she is doing everything she can to escape him.

One of my favorite details of the statue was seeing how the toes and feet and fingers of Daphne were turning into a tree trunk, tree roots and tendrils.

The ultimate effect and detail of his work is spectacular. I’m afraid a picture and my words here aren’t doing it much justice.

Well, after our problems yesterday and sitting down with a friend who is expert on Macintosh computers - we made the upgrade to Macintosh OS X Leopard.

I was so relieved just to see our laptop booting up properly again - but I’m also impressed by the new look of the system and one of the features I want to explore right away is the ability to back up the Mac on a hard-drive.

It took awhile for the system to go through all its processes and adapt to the laptop hardware, which gave me ample time to observe my friend and his daughter play Guitar Hero 3 on their Wii system. I had never tried out the Wii system before and wanted to try out tennis. I ended up trying out boxing as well. I think I spent most of my time just figuring out a little bit about how the controllers work.

It’s really a very unique approach to gaming and I loved the whole experience. At first I was a little frustrated because my tennis guy on the screen was lobbing the tennis ball directly to the computer player on the other side - turning the game into a perpetual volley that eventually I would lose. Then I learned that if I made a downward motion while ’swinging’ the control that it would put a little more spritz into the return.

I don’t know if we’ll be purchasing a Wii system anytime soon but it’s definitely my preference if we were going to purchase a gaming system. I’m intrigued by the possibilities of the Wii. It seems to me that if the system were set up right, it could be a real training tool as well as a fun game to play - whether to play guitar or to swing a racket. Right now it’s like playing a cartoon - that isn’t a criticism, just an observation.  It’s still a lot of fun …

… but I wonder if somewhere in a computer lab there’s a guy testing out an experimental Wii-type system that employs a real guitar, a real tennis racket or boxing gloves. Of course, that could end up being a bit dangerous to the furniture or others in a living room environment … but still, that’s what the Wii system experience had me thinking about.

One thing I read about recently is that the Wii system is now adopting more of the violent hack-n-slash type games and the interesting/intriguing/disturbing factor with this is that instead of a player hitting a joystick button they are making the stabbing/slashing motions with their arms.  I suppose that a player feels (psychologically) more like he/she is actually doing the killing in those kinds of games.  I wonder how long it will take before researchers are able to show whether that is a positive or a negative thing (although I am sure it will be very popular anyway).

I wonder as well about the potential of force feedback to the controller.  I think these days we’re playing a sort of Pac-Man/Space Invaders version of the games that will be in the future.  What would it be like to swing a controller and actually feel some kind of physical response or tremor as you strike the ball?