Villa Farnesina

The Villa Farnesina is a gorgeously frescoed private Renaissance villa belonging to a famous 16th-century banker in Rome, Italy

* Villa Farnesina
Via della Lungara 230
tel. +39-06-6802-7268
www.villafarnesina.it or www.lincei.it
Mon–Sat 9am–1pm
Adm

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The Villa FarnesinaBaldassare Peruzzi built this modestly sized but sumptuously decorated villa for banking mogul Agostino Chigi in 1508–11.

Lucky for posterity, Chigi had particularly good taste in artists and he hired the likes of Raphael, Sodoma, and the multi-talented Peruzzi to decorate the interior of his sumptuous new villa.

Downstairs: The Loggia of Galatea

The Galatea by Raphael in the Villa Farnesina
Raphael's Galatea.The Loggia of Galatea has a ceiling painted by Peruzzi with Chigi's horoscope symbols, lunettes by Sebastiano del Piombo featuring scenes from Ovid's Metamorphosis, and the famous Galatea by Raphael.

This perfectly composed Renaissance fresco depicts the nymph and her friends attempting to flee on the backs of pug-nosed dolphins from their mermen admirers, with an arch of oft-reproduced cupids hovering above, their arrows of love already taut in their bows.

Downstairs: The Loggia of Cupid & Psyche

The ceiling in the Loggia of Cupid and Psyche is frescoed as an open pergola of flowers and fruit that frame scenes from the myth of Psyche, a woman so beautiful Cupid himself fell in love with her.

The fresco cycle was designed by by Raphael, but largely executed between 1510 and 1517 (and restored in the 1990s) by Raphael’s students Giulio Romano, Raffaellino del Colle, and Francesco Penni.

Conspicuous consumption
Chigi loved to show off his vast wealth. At one memorably extravagant dinner held here on a now vanished loggia overlooking the Tiber River, Chigi had his servants toss the emptied silver plates into the river after each course. (Of course, Chigi didn't get so rich by being stupid; nets downstream collected all the tableware before it got too far.)

The master himself probably drew up the preparatory sketches and may have daubed his brushes a bit at the plaster as well, but Raphael spent most of the time he was meant to be here working visiting with his girlfriend, the Fornarina, the daughter of a baker who lived just down the road. (Her famous portrait by Raphael hangs in the Palazzo Barberini paining gallery—though, appropriately enough, there's a copy in the Palazzo Corsini gallery just across the street.)

It was after one such visit that Raphael came home with a high fever, which quickly worsened until the young genius died on April 6, 1520 from—and this was the official report—a "surfeit of love." Raphael was buried in the Pantheon.

Chigi, who died the same year, was buried in a now-famous chapel—designed by Raphael, later embellished by Bernini—in Santa Maria Novella.

Upstairs: The Peruzzi and Sodoma frescoes

The more things change...
Awesome trivia tidbit: in the 1870s, workers preparing to build the Tiber embankments stumbled across the remains of an ancient Roman villa on this property which turned out to be from the early 1st century and belong to Augustus' son-in-law, the great general Agrippa.

Like its Renaissance neighbor, the ancient palace had been slathered inside with frescoes, many of which were well preserved thanks to having been buried in mud during the Dark Ages from the very Tiber floods the modern embankments were being built to prevent.

One of the rooms of this ancient palace—nicknamed Villa della Farnesina—was a winter dining room, the walls of which were covered in trompe-l'oeil scenes of the surrounding gardens, as if you were dining outdoors under a tent in springtime. Peruzzi himself could have painted it.

More proof that, in Rome, tastes and trends often didn't change all that much, even over 1,500 years. See for yourself: the room has been recreated, with its original frescoes, in the National Roman Museum at Palazzo Massimo alle Terme.A detail of the trompe-l'oeil frescoes in the Sala delle Prospettive room, compelte with 16th century german graffiti
A detail of the trompe-l'oeil frescoes in the Sala delle Prospettive room—barely visible in the yellow "sky" are some 16th century German graffiti.In the grand Sala delle Prospettive upstairs, Peruzzi frescoed every inch of the walls to masterfully carry trompe-l'oeil to its extremes—the name of the room is a bit of a pun, and could be translated either as "Room of Perspectives" or "Room of Views."

The frescoes allowed Chigi to glimpse, straight through the walls, the (slightly idealized) outside world of Roman country and cityscape, peeped from between the painted marble columns of a (fake) open loggia. It was as if every day were a warm spring day and he could dine al fresco with views of the surrounding countryside.

Even with the frescoes faded by time, Peruzzi’s painterly and architectural tricks create a pretty convincing optical illusion. Notice how, from the correct angles, the room's real flooring and coffered ceiling are continued into the painted space with perfect perspective.

The imperial army of Charles V, sacking the city in 1527, didn't seem to have much respect for this talent, scratching into the frescoes' plaster anti-papal epithets in gothic German script and signing their names and in one place the date (at the time it was vandalous graffiti; time has turned it into a precious historical record to be preserved behind Plexiglas shields).

The wedding night of Alexander int eh bedroom of the Villa Farnesina
Sodoma's Wedding Night of Alexander in the bedroom of the Villa FarnesinaThe small bedchamber off this room was frescoed with a delightful scene of the Wedding Night of Alexander the Great by Il Sodoma.

The Tuscan painter frescoed an army of putti helping Roxanne off with her sandals and see-though nightie as Mr. the Great sashays over to join his new bride under the bed canopy (rather less romantic are the Alexander battle scenes frescoed on the room's other walls).

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This material was last updated February 2011. All information was accurate at the time.

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