Borghese Privately: From Bernini's First Work to His Best

One building holds the whole arc of a sculptor's career, and a private guide is what lets you walk it in order. The Amalthea group, a goat with the infant Jupiter and a faun, was made by Bernini as a teenager. For a long time it was catalogued as ancient, which is the compliment that mattered at the time. A few rooms away are the Rape of Proserpina, the David and Apollo and Daphne, carved within five years of each other in his early twenties, by which point he was doing things with marble nobody had attempted. Seeing that sequence in one visit is only possible here, because Scipione Borghese commissioned most of it and it never left. Private means the pace is yours across the twenty rooms, and it means you can circle the sculpture. Bernini composed these to be walked around, with a first view that sets up the second, and in a group of thirty you get one angle and a shoulder. Upstairs, the paintings, including Caravaggio's Young Sick Bacchus and the Boy with a Basket of Fruit. Skip-the-line entry.