The Borghesi sitting room The escape of the vestals

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 shows the episode of the escape of the Vestals from Rome upon the arrival of the Gauls, and in particular the one described by Tito Livio in the fifth book of "Ab Urbe condita" when "Lucio Albino, a man of the plebs, welcomes the fugitive Vestals on his chariot and makes his wife and children get off it". Lucio Albino is the character represented on horseback, in the center between the vestals, beautiful figures in precious clothes who flee carrying with them the tripod with the sacred fire of Vesta and the other furnishings of the temple (the statuette of the goddess and the instruments of sacrifices ). Ancient Rome is evoked by Borghesi through the view of the Pantheon on the bottom left, of other buildings, including the Pyramid of Cestius, and of a classic marble statue, while the historical episode of the invasion of the Gauls is remembered by the figures on the right, evidently caught while fleeing the city.