View of Villa Borghese

Cardinal Scipione Borghese, the pope's nephew who built this villa on the edge of Rome, died in 1633. Three years later Johann Wilhelm Baur, a miniaturist from Strasbourg, painted the house on a sheet of parchment only 45 centimetres wide. The facade is bright white and crowded with statues and reliefs. Below it the forecourt fills with carriages, riders, dogs and knots of men in black cloaks. For the museum this is a record of how the building first looked, and of the villa as a place where Roman society came to be seen. The picture may have been ordered by the cardinal's heir, Prince Marcantonio II Borghese. Baur signed and dated it on the base of the fountain at the lower left, yet an inventory of 1693 listed it under another painter's name, and his own was only restored in 1790.