Before Italy, I thought I knew how to look at art. Throughout my life, I have seen many famous works through studying Art History in school, visiting museums with my mom, or simply studying them on my own. But entering the Galleria Borghese in Rome completely changed my perspective on art. I was already knowledgeable about the sculptures, but I had not really delved into Bernini’s skill. The first thing I learned, and it struck me, was that when Bernini was carving a portrait of Cardinal Borghese, he deliberately inserted a fault line into the sculpture so Borghese would be enraged and send it back to him. Little did Borghese know this was part of Bernini’s plan; he came back with a brand-new sculpture, with no fault lines, in record time. So why did he do all of this? It was to show off his skill. Bernini was a cocky and extremely skillful artist at the time, and I think he did this to show off his wit and once-in-a-lifetime talent.

Bernini’s Rape of Persephone quite literally made my jaw drop. I had seen photographs of it before, but nothing prepared me for seeing it in person. What first caught my attention was Hades gripping Persephone’s thigh. His fingers press into the marble so convincingly that it genuinely looks like real skin. Looking at this sculpture on a screen and experiencing it in person are not the same. Seeing it on the screen, you can understand that Bernini is trying to make it seem realistic, but experiencing it in person, you can actually understand how he did it.

Walking around the sculpture also made the experience even more different. From each angle you look at, you notice something new, which you can not get by looking at a photograph. Persephone’s expression gets clearer, the movement of her body is exaggerated and Baroque-esque, the strands of her hair are wild and going everywhere, and the folds of the fabric are hyper-realistic. I noticed details I had never seen in pictures because I was close enough to really analyze the work, and it made me feel deeply connected to it.

I felt the same thing with Bernini’s David. I had studied this one in depth in my Art History course, so I was most excited to see it. Seeing this one in person made me realize how much scale and position matter. It is almost as if David’s body is twisting through space, and you are in the moment when he is about to kill Goliath. Standing beside him made his movement feel much more sudden and immediate. It interacts with you differently, making you feel like you are in the moment rather than just looking at it.

That experience changed what I think it means to see art. A photo can show me what a sculpture may look like, but it can never show me its scale, the way the light moves across the surface and interacts with the piece, or what it feels like to walk around it. At the Borghese Gallery, I stopped seeing art as something you can understand only on a screen or photo. I started seeing it as something I could physically experience, something I could understand more deeply by being in the same space with it and taking the time to look at it from every angle and decipher it.

Italy did not change the art for me; it changed the way I look at it now.

Aug 24, 2026