Exclusive offers and news in Rome

During his stay in Rome, Pieter Paul Rubens drew the famous ancient statue of Spinario with red charcoal. He shoots it from two different points of view and the result is that the drawing seems to have been made using a living model. This process of animating the ancient anticipates the moves of the artists who followed one another and would be defined as baroque. Nothing escaped the Flemish master's ability to observe and his desire to interpret the ancients: his drawings are vibrant, movement and feeling blend with the gestures and expressions of the characters. Rubens' formal and iconographic intuitions filter into the rich and varied Roman world of art and find the ideal heir in Bernini. With groups created by him in the 1620s, the sculptor reinterprets the famous ancient statues, giving movement and translating the marble into flesh, as happens in his masterpiece Ratto di Proserpina. The exhibition designed for the Galleria Borghese aims to underline the extraordinary contribution given by Rubens to a new conception of the ancient on the threshold of the Baroque.