Portrait of the Princes Camillo and Francesco Borghese

This tender, previously unknown group portrait drawing by the neoclassical painter Giuseppe Cades was discovered and identified by Maria Teresa Caracciolo at the time it passed through the art market in 2017. It is signed and dated by the artist, and depicts the two princes of the ancient Roman family as toddlers in elegant contemporary dress. Respectively the second- and third-born sons of the Prince of Sulmona, Camillo Borghese (1775-1832) later became the husband of Napoleon Bonaparte’s sister Pauline, and Francesco Borghese (1776-1839) married Adèle Marie Hortense Françoise de La Rochefoucauld. The elder Camillo, seated at center, wears grown-up breeches while Francesco stands at left still in an infant’s gown. The artist delicately rendered the heads and hands of the young princes in red chalk, with some slight touches of white gouache and a general economy of strokes. He reserved the forcefulness of his draftsmanship to boldly articulate the children’s clothing and the rest of the composition in black chalk, pressing hard on the paper, and adding white gouache highlights to animate the composition dramatically. In the same year as this drawing, Cades produced a large pastel portrait of the boys, together with their mother Agnese Colonna (1702-1780), descendant of the oldest family in Rome, who is also accompanied by a servant. As has been pointed out, the heads of the boys in the pastel group portrait and those in the present drawing seem exact, and may have therefore derived from the same studies from life. Here the boys grasp a paper at left with the design of the façade of Saint Peter’s (so identified by a small inscription in ink) and the seated Camillo, in a frontal pose, with his sweet gaze directly engaging the eye of the viewer, touches a large portrait bust of Pope Paul V Borghese (inscribed PAOLO V, and who reigned from 1605 to 1621), seen at right. The scene in the drawing therefore alludes to past glory, in referring to the most prominent member of the Borghese family and his accomplishment. The façade of St. Peter’s was the most visibly prestigious artistic project completed during the papacy of Paul V.

CCB, 9/2018