Pintoricchio's Lost Borgia Madonna Unveiled at Capitoline Museums

A new exhibition at the Capitoline Museums in Rome sheds light on a scandalous lost fresco from Pope Alexander VI's private apartment. The show, featuring around thirty works, focuses on a mural painting originally in the Borgia Apartment's cubicle, known through a copy on canvas commissioned by the Gonzaga family from Mantuan painter Pietro Fachetti. The painting, Madonna with Child and Alexander VI, was first attributed to Perugino and later to Pintoricchio. A controversial rumor, endorsed by Vasari, claimed the Virgin's face was a portrait of the pope's mistress, Giulia Farnese. The embarrassing work was covered, tampered with, and eventually split into two fragments, both in the Chigi collection in Rome: the so-called Bambin Gesù delle mani and the Madonna, exhibited for the first time. The exhibition reveals the Madonna has typical features of Pintoricchio's Marian iconography, while no trace of Alexander VI's portrait remains—possibly destroyed or lost. The show reconstructs the original context through large-format photographs of Pintoricchio's cycle and explores the golden moment of the late 15th-century Renaissance, combining Perugino's perspective, antique motifs from the Domus Aurea and Hadrian's Villa, and a taste for gold and ornament reflecting Borgia's Iberian mudéjar aesthetic.