Now these must-see staples have been joined by nearly 60 other Bernini works.

Museums that lent pieces — including the Louvre, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York — “were extremely supportive because they clearly understood that this was a unique occasion,” said Anna Coliva, the director of the gallery, who curated the show with Andrea Bacchi, the director of the Federico Zeri Foundation.

Image “I don’t think that there will ever be such a complete exhibit of Bernini,” said Anna Coliva, the director of the Borghese Gallery. Credit... Galleria Borghese

“I don’t think that there will ever be such a complete exhibit of Bernini,” she said in an interview.

The gallery’s halls offer a lushly decorated backdrop for the pieces “in a way that we hoped that Bernini” — who was also a showman, playwright and creator of extravagant spectacles — “might have envisaged, had he been alive,” Ms. Coliva added in an interview.

The gallery has staged a Bernini exhibition with loans before, when it reopened in 1998 after a lengthy renovation. The latest exhibition builds on the Borghese collection, fleshing out the artist’s career from his apprenticeship with his father, the sculptor Pietro Bernini (a collaboration that Gian Lorenzo “would later try to expunge,” Mr. Bacchi said), with a series of sculptures they crafted in tandem, to his ambition to become an all-around artist, adding architecture and painting to his already considerable skills.

For the first time, over a dozen paintings — portraits and half-figures — that are universally accepted as by Bernini are being shown under one roof. They are juxtaposed with his better-known marble and bronze busts, mostly of powerful clerics.