Penni’s Return to the Galleria Borghese

At the Galleria Borghese, art history sometimes takes the form of a return. With the exhibition Return to the Galleria Borghese: Giovan Francesco Penni and Raphael’s Workshop, the Roman museum reunites two panels that once belonged to the same series after more than two centuries apart. At the center of the show is the Allegory of Good Hope, attributed to Giovan Francesco Penni and recently reacquired by the museum, now restored to the collection documented in the seventeenth-century Borghese inventories. The work is displayed alongside Charity, its original pendant, now in a private collection, offering an opportunity to reconstruct a fragment of the gallery’s collecting history and the dispersals that occurred between the late eighteenth century and the Napoleonic period. The exhibition also turns the spotlight on Penni himself, a Florentine painter born between 1488 and 1496 and among Raphael’s most loyal collaborators. Active in the great Roman artistic enterprises - from the Vatican Rooms to the frescoes of the Farnesina - he was one of the artists who helped disseminate Raphael’s style in early sixteenth-century Rome. In dialogue with a rare autograph painting from the Abbey of Cava de’ Tirreni, the project sheds light on the complexity of Raphael’s workshop and its collaborative creative process.