It is something of an Italian Renaissance trope that during the 15th and 16th centuries, painting rose in social and intellectual status, ranking itself alongside the art of poetry. Less known is that during the early 1600s the rapport between the visual and literary arts was brought to a whole new level by the Neapolitan poet Giambattista Marino (also known as Giovan Battista Marino, 1569-1625). His unprecedented commitment to versifying painting is the subject of an exhibition at the Galleria Borghese, once home to the art patron, and Marino contemporary, Cardinal Scipione Borghese.
The gallery’s exhibition, curated by Emilio Russo, Patrizia Tosini and Andrea Zezza, aims to establish Marino’s art historical centrality, which is still under-recognised four centuries after his death. As Zezza says, “When we think about the early Seicento, we think about Caravaggio, Bernini, Rubens, but in all this Marino had a significant role.”
Competing with artists
This role is epitomised in the ideal gallery Marino spent much of his peripatetic life dreaming up, as he moved from court to court—from Naples to Rome, Genoa and Turin, eventually settling in Paris in 1615 before returning to his home city before his death—acquainting himself with their art collections and some of Europe’s leading artists. The project would see the light only in literary form: Marino’s book La Galeria (the gallery, 1619) consists of 624 stanzas poeticising—or, as Zezza emphasises, “competing with”—artists and works of art.
“The Renaissance had already fostered a rapport between painting and poetry,” Zezza says. “But Marino created a whole book dedicated to this rapport, at a time when spaces dedicated exclusively to viewing art—galleries—were beginning to emerge.”
The show will bring together early editions of Marino’s books with works of art that relate to them, either directly or by capturing the essence of his poetic-pictorial vision, as embodied especially in L’Adone (1623), his richly allegorical, image-strewn retelling of the doomed love affair between Venus and Adonis.
Highlights will include Tintoretto’s Narcissus (1550s) and Frans Pourbus the Younger’s portrait of Marino (around 1621), and above all the final room, which will explore Marino’s relationship with Nicolas Poussin, whom he met in Paris while serving at the court of Marie de’ Medici. Poussin’s Empire of Flora (around 1630-31), Zezza says, “represents the principal themes of Marino’s poetry, which through mythology manifested a sort of encyclopaedia of knowledge.”
In a jauntily fitting way, the exhibition will fulfil the poet’s dream, Zezza says: “Marino’s game of mirrors, through which he reflects images in words, has turned into our own act of mirroring his ideal gallery in the real one made by Scipione Borghese, the poet’s contemporary.”
• Painting and Poetry in the 17th Century: Giovan Battista Marino and the Wonderful Passion, Galleria Borghese, Rome, 19 November-9 February 2025
