Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic In a scintillating start to Paris’s autumn season, one superb collection welcomes another, legendary one: the Musée Jacquemart-André reopens, more opulent than ever after a year’s refurbishment, to host Masterpieces from the Borghese Gallery. It’s a heady meeting: two villa museums evolved from the private homes and art of visionary collectors, each preserving its distinctive taste.The Parisian collection was extravagantly nostalgic: packing their Boulevard Haussmann mansion with pictures and precious objects from the Renaissance to the rococo, Second Empire banker Édouard André and society painter Nélie Jacquemart created a gilded refuge from 19th-century industrialisation and turmoil.Cardinal Scipione Borghese’s collection, by contrast, was dazzlingly of its time: in the early 17th century he sought the best contemporary and recent art to adorn his Villa Pinciana, the “villa of delights” which became Rome’s Borghese Gallery.Highlights sent to Paris celebrate the Borghese’s full dramatic, aesthetic and emotional range. The cool watchful blonde “Lady with Unicorn”, Raphael’s enigmatic answer to the “Mona Lisa”, surveys us from her loggia. Bernini’s self-portrait, black eyes flashing, seethes with restless ambition. Titian’s “Scourged Christ”, indomitable, violated, heroic, based on the Belvedere Torso, emerges in half-light to fix his executioners with a look of terrible defiance.Annibale Carracci depicts a huge, sinewy “Samson in Chains” at an instant of tension and resolve, about to burst free, illuminated by a divine glow in his dark prison. And the earth moves in Veronese’s tilting, fluid “St John the Baptist Preaching”: layers of shifting perspectives around the powerful diagonal figure show his listeners responding, startled, challenged, intrigued, in different tones. All were artists favoured by Scipione, who amassed his collection with the notorious Borghese ruthlessness. He acquired the show’s seductive opening stunner, Caravaggio’s “Boy with Basket of Fruit”, by contriving criminal charges against its owner, painter-collector Giuseppe Cesari, who avoided jail by “donating” his works to the Borghese family. It is a fantastically worldly picture, Caravaggio’s pouting décolleté playboy hugging blushing peaches, spilling pomegranates, fat figs — fruits depicted, with almost sinister realism, tipping into over-ripeness, withering leaves a summons to enjoy life’s fleeting pleasures.The story of Scipione’s rarefied collection plays in dialogue with the adventures of André and Jacquemart, as ruthless in their way. From a villa in Mira in the Veneto in 1893, they snagged and dismantled, to local horror, Tiepolo’s monumental yet light and airy fresco “Henri III being welcomed to the Contarini Villa”, depicting courtiers greeting the French king in Venice. Reassembled atop the gold and white marble double helix staircase in the Jacquemart’s exhilarating Winter Garden, it gives every visitor today the frisson of a royal welcome.In their dining room — now the museum’s café — the couple installed a Tiepolo ceiling fresco: comic spectators, some masked, dangling hats and parasols, lean over trompe l’oeil balconies to ogle us, the crowds, below; the starring character is a monkey about to tumble out of the picture into our space. Throughout the museum an 18th-century decorative spirit — Boucher, Fragonard — presides, interrupted by velvet-lined galleries of Florentine and Venetian painting. Renaissance trophies dot luxuriant interiors: Donatello’s playful “Spiritelli” candle holders, Bernini’s chiselled bronze of wise, frail reformer-pope Gregory XV, sharp eyes gazing at us and into eternity.Now Gregory is joined from Rome by Bernini’s marble portrait of his Borghese predecessor, Paul V, austere, commanding, blankly staring from pupil-less eyes, compelling too in virtuoso tactile details of skin and fabric. This was commissioned by Scipione, who grasped the precocious teenage Bernini’s importance when he sculpted the shaggy beast feeding an infant Jupiter, “The Goat Amalthea”, also visiting Paris. Flatteringly, Amalthea symbolised the cornucopia of Borghese largesse, ushering in a new Roman golden age.Refined and astute, Scipione generously patronised the early Baroque artists who were his contemporaries. Grace within tension characterises his choices: Giovanni Baglione’s “Judith and Holofernes”, the slayer’s sinuous beauty set against her victim’s brutal body; Guido Reni’s “Moses Breaking the Tablets of the Law”, the patriarch’s furious gestures matched by leaden skies, his open, screaming mouth blood red like the lustrous cloak rippling elegantly across the picture.But it was Scipione’s quest for the most sophisticated 16th-century masterpieces which really make the collection stellar. From the Medici, he acquired Brescianino’s pearly-pink-grey “Venus and Two Cupids”, the goddess, between flesh and stone, framed statue-like in a niche and admiring her reflection in a conch shell, referencing her sea birth, as well as Jacopo Zucchi’s erotic jewel-adorned nudes “Cupid and Psyche”. Spotlit by Psyche’s lamp in a crimson-curtained interior, this is full of historical allusions: Cupid reclines in the pose of Michelangelo’s “River God”; the lovers’ bed is engraved with a figure from his “Night”, executed to decorate Medici tombs.In the exhibition’s most exquisite room, “Amour et Éros”, these hang with one of the earliest, finest copies of Leonardo’s lost “Leda”, the nude held in the swan’s winged embrace, watching their cherubic twins and an unhatched egg hidden in the grass, and with Scipione’s great Titian, “Venus Blindfolding Cupid”. This late arcane picture is painted in rapid loose strokes which break up forms but at a distance blend texture, figures and ground in intense gold-reds. Venus holds the yellow ribbon around Cupid’s head delicately, neither tightening nor loosening it, the restraint possibly an allegory for conjugal love balancing sensuality and order. A lesser-known delight in this room is another “Leda”, Ghirlandaio’s fleshy Mannerist heroine seen from the back as she twists uncertainly towards us, attracted to though wary of the insistent, insolent swan.Masterpieces from the Borghese plunges you into the mindset of privileged Borghese Rome, its dovetailed classical and religious learning, yet there are moments which feel utterly in the present. At the opening, Bassano’s vibrant multicoloured “Last Supper” pulls you into a feast of timeless, even irreverent characters: Saint John dozing at the table, disciples casually quarrelling, a cat sneaking in, a dog comfortably curled up. The expressions and gestures in Giulio Romano’s “Madonna and Child with the Infant St John the Baptist”, taking place in a bedroom, are so lively and natural that the scene conjures any young mother negotiating demands of a baby and toddler, with pet dog patiently waiting. A tremendous portrait gallery showcases charismatic young men. Antonello da Messina’s has a warm, ironic smile, features strongly sculpted; Parmigianino’s is a disquieted, strict youth in black; and, most affecting, Lorenzo Lotto’s dark-eyed, bearded widower, with two wedding rings, holds a tiny skull, his melancholy expression imploring, introspective, mysterious. You could meet any of them now as you emerge from this absorbing exhibition into Le Nélie café (expect queues), where Tiepolo’s monkey is still laughing, and the sky on the ceiling is always blue.September 6-January 5, musee-jacquemart-andre.comFind out about our latest stories first — follow FTWeekend on Instagram and X, and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen
