Caravaggio meeting Bacon at the Borghese Gallery

Carravaggio Bacon exhibition

If you are coming to Rome this fall, be sure not to miss out on the interesting exhibition at Borghese Gallery on the two giants Carravaggio and Bacon.
After Raphael in 2006, Canova in 2007 and Correggio in 2008, 2009 is the year that the gallery dedicated to a confrontation between two of the biggest and most controversial players in the history of painting. The timeless work of Caravaggio meets the explosive energy in the paintings of Francis Bacon in this the fourth of the ten events scheduled at the Borghese Gallery in Rome. This exhibition is part of the project “Ten major exhibitions in ten years.”
From October 1, 2009 to January 24, 2010, the exhibition will run as a celebration since it is now 400 years since Carravaggio died.

20 of Carravaggio’s painting will be flanked by as many paintings of Francis Bacon. Even though almost four centuries divide the two painters there are lots of similarities. Both were vibrant personalities, who translated the pictorial virtuosity of the torment of existence with equal intensity and originality. This is a comparison never made before, with paintings coming from the most important museums and collections around the world.
Caravaggio and Francis Bacon are among the most revolutionary and profound interpreters of the representation of the human figure. Bacon paints are very different from those of Caravaggio.

Francis Bacon

He was not inspired by him, but if there is an artist of our time that was similar to Caravaggio it is Bacon. Both have the diversity of their poetry and their time. Both have penetrated the mystery of existence with shocking originality in their art, representing the spiritual truth in the most traumatic immediacy of the flesh. The exhibition at the Borghese Gallery shows a connection between the paintings of Caravaggio and those of Bacon, offering the viewer to join the exceptional aesthetic experience that goes with it, rather than following the usual reconstruction of historical criticism.
Bacon has always rejected the approach of his works to those of earlier artists, many of whom he loved with great competence. His eye was on the great masters of astonishing brilliance, so advanced that it does not necessarily imply the direct influence on his painting. Its many pictorial sources, including those from art, are, moreover, always filtered through the photographic mediation, through which an exorbitant amount of images affects his perception, not logical order than that required by the instinctive new work being created .
Caravaggio is today intimately linked to the history of the Borghese Gallery, a perfect place to celebrate the fourth centenary of his death. The Borghese Gallery retains vivid marks of this relationship through six masterpieces, the Boy with a Basket of Fruit, Sick Bacchus, Madonna of Palafrenieri, David with the Head of Goliath, Saint Jerome and Saint John the Baptist writer.

David with the Head of Goliath

The permanent collection of the Borghese Gallery is enriched with key works of his production as “the Denial of St. Peter” from the Metropolitan of New York, “the fall of Saul” from Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome, “the Martyrdom of St. Ursula” from Palazzo Zevallos Stigliano in Naples and the Portrait of Antonio Martelli, Knight of Malta from Palazzo Pitti.
These will be complemented the paintings of Francis Bacon from the major museums in the world.

Open Tuesday through Sunday. Entrance at 09:00, 11:00, 13:00, 15:00 and 17:00.

Tickets can be reserved on phone +39 06-328 10, or on:

http://www.ticketeria.it/ticketeria/borghese-eng.asp