The Borghesi sitting room Achilles dragging Hector's body

It is a cycle of thirteen panels, all originally painted on plaster and then torn and transported on different supports, first on canvas and then on hardboard. The cycle was painted by Giovan Battista Borghesi in 1812-1814 in his uncle Pietro Borghesi's house in Parma; the paintings were saved when it was decided to demolish the building in 1951, thanks to the interest of the historian Giovanni Copertini, and then bought by a collector. They returned to the antiques market in 1997, where they have been purchased by the Cariparma Foundation at a Finarte auction (Milan, 23 October 1997) and placed in such a way as to reconstruct the original room of the artist's uncle's house. The panels are all of mythological subject but not linked together. The cycle of the Borghesi house can be considered one of the artist's first independent tests and it allows us to know his first style that was strongly linked to neoclassical examples, French and Italian, but above all it was based on local 16th-century models and beyond: the reference is here to Parmigianino, that is clear in the figures of the monochrome nudes with serpentine shapes.

The panel represents the episode taken from the XXII book of the Iliad in which Achilles, after killing Hector, drags his lifeless body with the chariot around the walls of Troy. In the foreground, Achilles, crowned by a flying Fame, sets off the chariot to which Hector's lifeless body is tied and with him is another soldier on horseback. In the background there are several groups of soldiers: the Greeks are celebrating while the Trojans are deperate; then there are the figures of fainting Andromache and two other women who are supporting her; in the background Borghesi inserts the view of Troy with the walls and the tall and imposing buildings, while on the right we can see the prows of the Greek ships.