Museo Pietro Canonica, Art museum in Villa Borghese, Rome, Italy.
Museo Pietro Canonica is an art museum located in Villa Borghese that displays the sculptor's works across seven exhibition rooms on the ground floor. The collection includes sculptures, models, and sketches that span different periods of his artistic career.
The building, called Gallinaro in 17th-century documents, housed ostriches, peacocks and ducks for the Borghese hunts. After a 1919 fire and abandonment, the Municipality of Rome granted it to Pietro Canonica in 1926; he restored it, turning the stables into exhibition rooms. A first museum nucleus opened after his death in 1959, and in 1988 the living quarters were added under his widow's bequest.
The living quarters are on the upper floor, not the first: the Red Room served as a salon, with a 1581 fireplace of volcanic stone and 16th- and 17th-century furniture. There Canonica kept the uniform of Tsar Alexander II and the costume of King Faisal I of Iraq, and sketches for the title pages of his own operas. The bedroom holds signed photographs of Nicholas II and Alexandra Feodorovna and his foreign orders.
The museum is closed on Mondays. It stands at via Pietro Canonica 2, by piazza di Siena in Villa Borghese, and the entrance is reached past the two bronze figures of the mule Scudella and the alpine soldier. The ground-floor sculpture rooms and the first-floor furnished apartment are visited in one route.
Canonica received commissions from European royal families that took him to various courts, where he created portraits and monuments. Some of these major works are not displayed here, but the collection shows his importance in the international sculpture world of his era.
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