The Villa Farnesina is a
Renaissance
The Renaissance ( , ) , from , with the same meanings. is a period in European history marking the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity and covering the 15th and 16th centuries, characterized by an effort to revive and surpass id ...
suburban
villa
A villa is a type of house that was originally an ancient Roman upper class country house. Since its origins in the Roman villa, the idea and function of a villa have evolved considerably. After the fall of the Roman Republic, villas became s ...
in the Via della Lungara, in the district of
Trastevere in
Rome
, established_title = Founded
, established_date = 753 BC
, founder = King Romulus ( legendary)
, image_map = Map of comune of Rome (metropolitan city of Capital Rome, region Lazio, Italy).svg
, map_caption ...
, central
Italy
Italy ( it, Italia ), officially the Italian Republic, ) or the Republic of Italy, is a country in Southern Europe. It is located in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, and its territory largely coincides with the homonymous geographical ...
.
Description
The villa was built for
Agostino Chigi, a rich
Sienese
Siena ( , ; lat, Sena Iulia) is a city in Tuscany, Italy. It is the capital of the province of Siena.
The city is historically linked to commercial and banking activities, having been a major banking center until the 13th and 14th centu ...
banker and the treasurer of
Pope Julius II. Between 1506 and 1510, the Sienese artist and pupil of
Bramante,
Baldassare Peruzzi, aided perhaps by
Giuliano da Sangallo, designed and erected the villa. The novelty of this suburban villa design can be discerned from its differences from that of a typical urban
palazzo (palace). Renaissance palaces typically faced onto a street and were decorated versions of defensive castles: rectangular blocks with rusticated ground floors and enclosing a courtyard. This villa, intended to be an airy summer pavilion, presented a side towards the street and was given a U-shaped plan with a five-bay loggia between the arms. In the original arrangement, the main entrance was through the north facing loggia which was open. Today, visitors enter on the south side and the loggia is glazed.
Chigi also commissioned the
fresco decoration of the villa by artists such as
Raphael
Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino, better known as Raphael (; or ; March 28 or April 6, 1483April 6, 1520), was an Italian painter and architect of the High Renaissance. His work is admired for its clarity of form, ease of composition, and visual ...
,
Sebastiano del Piombo,
Giulio Romano, and
Il Sodoma. The themes were inspired by the ''Stanze'' of the poet
Angelo Poliziano, a key member of the circle of
Lorenzo de Medici. Best known are Raphael's frescoes on the ground floor; in the loggia depicting the classical and secular myths of
Cupid and Psyche, and ''
The Triumph of Galatea''. This, one of his few purely secular paintings, shows the near-naked nymph on a shell-shaped chariot amid frolicking attendants and is reminiscent of
Botticelli's ''The Birth of Venus''. This same "Galatea" loggia has a horoscope vault that displays the positions of the planets around the zodiac on the patron's birth date, 29 November 1466. The two main ceiling panels of the vault give his precise time of birth, 9:30 pm on that date.
At first floor level, Peruzzi painted the main ''salone'' with ''
trompe-l'œil
''Trompe-l'œil'' ( , ; ) is an artistic term for the highly realistic optical illusion of three-dimensional space and objects on a two-dimensional surface. ''Trompe l'oeil'', which is most often associated with painting, tricks the viewer into ...
'' frescoes of a grand open loggia with an illusory city and countryside view beyond. The perspective of the painted balcony and
colonnade is very accurate from a fixed point in the room. In the adjoining bedroom, Sodoma painted scenes from the life of
Alexander the Great
Alexander III of Macedon ( grc, Ἀλέξανδρος, Alexandros; 20/21 July 356 BC – 10/11 June 323 BC), commonly known as Alexander the Great, was a king of the ancient Greek kingdom of Macedon. He succeeded his father Philip II to ...
, the marriage of Alexander and Roxana, and Alexander receives the family of Darius.
The villa became the property of the
Farnese family in 1577 (hence the name of Farnesina). Also in the 16th century,
Michelangelo
Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni (; 6 March 1475 – 18 February 1564), known as Michelangelo (), was an Italian sculptor, painter, architect, and poet of the High Renaissance. Born in the Republic of Florence, his work was in ...
proposed linking the
Palazzo Farnese on the other side of the
River Tiber, where he was working, to the Villa Farnesina with a private bridge. This was initiated, as remnants of a few arches are present in the back of Palazzo Farnese towards via Giulia on the other side of the Tiber, but was never completed.
Later the villa belonged to the
Bourbon Bourbon may refer to:
Food and drink
* Bourbon whiskey, an American whiskey made using a corn-based mash
* Bourbon barrel aged beer, a type of beer aged in bourbon barrels
* Bourbon biscuit, a chocolate sandwich biscuit
* A beer produced by ...
s of
Naples
Naples (; it, Napoli ; nap, Napule ), from grc, Νεάπολις, Neápolis, lit=new city. is the regional capital of Campania and the third-largest city of Italy, after Rome and Milan, with a population of 909,048 within the city's adminis ...
and in 1861 to the Spanish
Ambassador
An ambassador is an official envoy, especially a high-ranking diplomat who represents a state and is usually accredited to another sovereign state or to an international organization as the resident representative of their own government or sov ...
in Rome, Bermudez de Castro, Duke of Ripalta. Today, owned by the Italian State, it accommodates the
Accademia dei Lincei, a long-standing and renowned Roman academy of sciences. Until 2007 it also housed the Gabinetto dei Disegni e delle Stampe (Department of Drawings and Prints) of the Istituto Nazionale per la Grafica, Roma.
The main rooms of the villa, including the Loggia, are open to visitors.
See also
* Galatea (Raphael)
References
*
External links
Villa Farnesina: official site
Images
Garden Facade
Architecture
Satellite photo
— The bracket-shaped building southwest (lower) of the Tiber, in the centre of photo, is the Villa Farnesina. The Palazzo Farnese is the massive almost square, courtyarded structure to the North of the Tiber.
{{authority control
Buildings and structures completed in 1510
Houses completed in the 16th century
Farnesina, Villa
Farnesina
Farnesina may refer to:
Architecture
* Casa della Farnesina, an historic building of the ancient Rome, in the neighborhood of Trastevere, Rome
* Palazzo della Farnesina, the headquarters of Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the government of the ...
Fresco paintings in Rome
Renaissance architecture in Rome
Raphael
Rome R. XIII Trastevere
1510 establishments in the Papal States
Farnese residences