Pair of five-light candelabra 1774 Luigi Valadier Italian After the death of his father in 1763, Prince Marcantonio Borghese (1730–1800) inherited a great fortune that included the finest private art collection in the Eternal City.[1] His subsequent role as one of the most important collector-patrons of the Neoclassical period –rivaling, in his own family, Cardinal Scipione Borghese (1576–1633) in the Early Baroque era – has not received the attention that it deserves.[2] The creator of this pair of candelabra, Luigi Valadier (1726–1785), became the principal goldsmith for Prince Marcantonio,

Pair of five-light candelabra 1774 Luigi Valadier Italian After the death of his father in 1763, Prince Marcantonio Borghese (1730–1800) inherited a great fortune that included the finest private art collection in the Eternal City.[1] His subsequent role as one of the most important collector-patrons of the Neoclassical period –rivaling, in his own family, Cardinal Scipione Borghese (1576–1633) in the Early Baroque era – has not received the attention that it deserves.[2] The creator of this pair of candelabra, Luigi Valadier (1726–1785), became the principal goldsmith for Prince Marcantonio, who was close to him in age, thus extending the ties that the artisan's father, the goldsmith Andrea Valadier (d. 1757), had established to the Borghese court decades earlier.[3]The superior design and precise, finely detailed craftsmanship of the present five-light candelabra place them among the most distinguished art objects created in the second half of the eighteenth century, an exciting period of Roman creativity influenced by the theories of Johann Joachim Winckelmann and the progressive inventions of Giovanni Battista Piranesi.[4] Thanks to the archival research of Alvar González-Palacios, we know a great deal about the circumstances of their manufacture. They were made for the suite of public rooms in the Palazzo Borghese in Rome that the architect Antonio Asprucci was redecorating for Prince Marcantonio.[5] They were to be displayed on two small tables – also executed in the color scheme of deep red porphyry and gilded bronze – in the Galleriola dei Cesari (so called because sixteen ancient porphyry busts of Roman emperors were on view there in niches).[6] Porphyry has been associated since Roman times with personages "born in the purple"; it is also a difficult stone to work. González-Palacios suggests that Lorenzo Cardelli, a stone carver who collaborated with Valadier on several mantelpieces of porphyry and marble the following year, made the porphy

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