Exposition
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The Jacquemart-André museum houses around forty works collected by the Italian papal family, and allows us to admire Botticelli as well as Bernini, mythology as well as naturalism.
Since not all roads lead to Rome, those who love Italian Renaissance painting can simply go to the Jacquemart-André Museum, which has been slightly renovated (in particular the restaurant and the Tiepolo fresco that covers the ceiling). Until January, there are about forty works there, medium formats, from the Italian capital and one of the most beautiful museums in the world, the Borghese Gallery. They are displayed in the usual eight small rooms where they seem to act as antechambers, like emissaries from a faraway country. Welcomed by the trio of silent butlers formed by three small sculptures by Bernini, including the goat Amalthea suckling the infant Jupiter, a horned and goatee beast more nourishing than Picasso’s, the visitor discovers or rediscovers paintings, each of which, or almost, is worth the trip. In the process, he will lighten, if not his conscience, at least his carbon footprint.
Conscience did not seem to pose a great problem for the Borghese, who created the collection at the beginning of the 17th century, the uncle having become pope under the name of Paul V and his nephew Scipio having been made a cardinal by him. The flawless taste of these gangsters in robes and mosettes went from the last part of the 15th to the first part of the 17th century, from Botticelli to Bernini. It was modern taste: what had gone before did not exist, a memory was invented by seizing the best of the moment. On August 25, 1827, in Rome, Stendhal wrote: “Most of the paintings in the Borghè Gallery
