The Villa Farnesina in Rome

What happens when the vast wealth of the Pope’s personal banker joins forces with the talents of some of the greatest artists of the Italian Renaissance – amongst them Raphael, a man thought by contemporaries to have been sent from heaven by God himself to beautify the world?

The spectacular answer is the Villa Farnesina: a sumptuous pleasure palace built on the banks of the Tiber for Agostino Chigi, financier to the popes and by most reckonings the richest man in 16th-century Europe, at the very dawn of the High Renaissance.

Blessed with a limitless supply of ready cash and an abundance of good taste, Chigi spared no expense in realising his vision of a relaxing country retreat on the very doorstep of the city, a ‘suburban villa’ from where he could effectively run his business empire and throw lavish parties that epitomised the “bella figura” of a golden age.

Chigi came from a long dynasty of Sienese bankers, and had enriched the family fortune by lending enormous sums of money to Europe’s popes and princes — among them both the Borgias and the Medicis.
His star reached its highest point when the warrior-pope Julius II (patron of both Michelangelo and Raphael) ascended to the papal throne.

In exchange for the financial backing that Julius needed to pursue his military and artistic ambitions, Chigi was appointed Treasurer to the Vatican and forged a close personal friendship with the Pope — two men bound together by a shared love of art, antiquity, learning and money.

At the height of his power, Chigi employed an estimated 20,000 people and controlled a fleet of a hundred ships operating across the Mediterranean and beyond.

The age of global trade had arrived, and Chigi was its most energetic beneficiary: he had offices in every major city in Europe, and his bank — headquartered in the shadow of the Vatican — was the essential lubricant of European political and religious life. He was, in the fullest sense of the term, the first global businessman.

Agostino’s private life matched his luxury-loving public persona, and a whirlwind romance with Imperia, the city’s most renowned courtesan who counted cardinals and bishops amongst her always-satisfied clientele, was merely his most famous feat of amor.

Imperia died — by suicide, according to the most compelling rumour — in 1511, reportedly after losing the affections of the banker she loved.

After her death Chigi quickly formed a new relationship with Francesca Ordeaschi, a young Venetian woman of humble origins with whom he scandalously cohabited, unmarried, for years, fathering four children before finally making their relationship official with an extravagant wedding ceremony presided over by the Medici Pope Leo X in 1519.

The regular parties thrown in the halls and gardens of Chigi’s riverside villa were highlights of the early 16th-century social calendar, attended by the most renowned writers, princes and ecclesiastics of the Roman Renaissance.

Amidst poetry readings and theatrical performances, Chigi dispensed legendary acts of largesse – during a particularly notorious banquet thrown to celebrate the baptism of his son Lorenzo in 1518, the banker demonstrated his contempt for the material world and the irrelevancy of petty affairs of money by ordering his servants to collect the priceless silverware and gold used by his guests after each course and fling them into the Tiber’s murky depths.

But Chigi didn’t become one of the world’s richest men by literally throwing money away – apparently the cagey banker had installed strategically placed nets just beneath the water’s surface in order to retrieve the precious crockery after his drunken guests had disappeared into the Roman night.

In commissioning the Villa Farnesina, Chigi turned to the Sienese architect and painter Baldassare Peruzzi — who would later be buried in the Pantheon alongside his friend Raphael — and asked for something completely unlike anything else in Rome. The result was genuinely revolutionary.

Roman palaces of the Renaissance era were typically designed as fortified blocks looming over the narrow streets of the city, with thick walls, small windows and all the visual warmth of a tax office.

Peruzzi rejected this model entirely, designing instead a U-shaped building open at its south side towards the garden, its wings embracing a central courtyard and an open loggia facing the river.

The building reads less like a fortress than like a country house — airy, light, surrounded by nature — which was precisely the point: Chigi wanted a villa suburbana, a suburban retreat from which he could conduct his business empire and throw spectacular parties in an atmosphere of aristocratic ease.

The garden, which has diminished from its original extent, once ran down to the bank of the Tiber; Chigi would entertain guests by boat.

In addition to Peruzzi, Chigi called upon the services of Raphael, Giuliano Romano, Sebastiano del Piombo and Il Sodoma, and the villa’s every wall is covered in priceless works of High Renaissance art.

Raphael’s Triumph of Galatea (c. 1512) occupies the left-hand wall of the loggia: a riotous, exuberant celebration of the sea-nymph Galatea, who skims across the waves in a shell chariot pulled by two dolphins, surrounded by a cavalcade of sea-gods blowing conches to herald her voyage and playful sea-centaurs and cupids aiming their arrows from above.

The composition is a masterclass in controlled energy: every figure is in motion, every glance and gesture locked into a system of forces that nevertheless feel completely spontaneous.

Galatea herself — eyes raised to the heavens, wind in her hair, drapery flying — was described by Raphael in a famous letter as a beauty conceived not from any living woman but from an “ideal of beauty” that existed in his mind. Looking at her, you understand exactly what he meant.

The story behind the painting has a characteristically bittersweet Roman edge. Galatea was loved, hopelessly and unrequitedly, by the one-eyed giant Polyphemus, whose lovelorn serenades she found laughable.

Amused by his clumsy courting, the refined and flighty Galatea sped away from her admirer with her watery retinue.

The story has a dark end: the jilted Cyclops murdered Galatea’s lover, and in her grief the nymph transformed his blood into the river Acis in Sicily.

According to the gossipers of 16th-century Rome, Galatea’s face bears the features of none other than Imperia, the ill-fated courtesan who poisoned herself after losing the affections of Chigi.

In the adjacent fresco, the doomed Polyphemus stares after his departing nymph with a peculiarly melancholy expression as he grips his panpipes, on which he had composed a rustic paean to his undying passion.

This work is by Sebastiano del Piombo, a rival of Raphael and great ally of Michelangelo who was one of the most talented Venetian painters of his generation.

Chigi had deliberately placed the two artists in competition — Raphael’s Florentine disegno (drawing and design) pitted against Sebastiano’s Venetian colore — in the same room. The dialogue between the two works is one of the most subtly illuminating things you can study in Roman Renaissance painting.

Before moving through the Villa, lift your eyes to the ceiling of the Loggia of Galatea. Peruzzi covered it with an elaborate astrological horoscope for Chigi — who was an enthusiastic follower of celestial portents — depicting the positions of the planets and constellations at the precise moment of his birth on 29 November 1466 (even the exact time, 9:30 PM, is encoded in the ceiling’s two main panels).

The patron had been so committed to astrological auspices that he refused to begin construction of the Villa until the stars aligned favourably, finally laying the foundation stone on 22 April 1506 — the legendary anniversary of the founding of Rome.

His resident astrologer Cornelio Benigni designed the horoscope, and it is a characteristically 16th-century document: every planet and sign, naturally, predicts a life of outstanding talent, easy charm, excellent taste and limitless prosperity.

Personifications of constellations and the zodiac combine in a stunning and complex symbolic display that reasserted the magnificence of the worldly banker for those who knew how to decipher it.

Look out for the small black-and-white portrait head inserted into one of the lunettes on the far wall — a mysterious intrusion into the otherwise unified decorative scheme.

For generations it was rumoured to be by Michelangelo himself. The story goes that Michelangelo, rather busy in his own right at the time just a mile away in the Sistine Chapel, was curious what Raphael was getting up to, and, aided and abetted by Sebastiano, managed to sneak into the villa one day to take a look.

Impressed by what he saw, the great man decided to leave a mark in the villa himself, rapidly painting a monochrome portrait of a youth in one of the lunettes of the palace as if to remind Raphael that there was more than one master in town.

It’s a tale that’s been told in Rome for centuries, and while there’s no evidence for any of this, one thing is certain:with its rich modelling and assured design, the masterful black and white portrait (above the landscape of the right) is worthy of Michelangelo himself!

In 1517, Raphael returned to the Villa to decorate the airy entrance loggia — at the time open directly to the garden beyond — with the commission that is arguably his greatest secular work.

Love was in the air: Chigi was finally preparing to marry his long-time partner Francesca, and he wanted decorations that reflected the mood of the impending nuptials.

Raphael and his greatest pupils — Giulio Romano, Giovan Francesco Penni and Giovanni da Udine — chose as their subject the ancient tale of Cupid and Psyche as recounted from Lucius Apuleius’ Golden Ass.

Psyche was a mortal princess of such extraordinary beauty that the goddess Venus herself grew jealous and set out to destroy her.

Things go predictably pear-shaped when Cupid, Venus’ son who had been commanded to act as the architect of the princess’ downfall, himself falls head over heels in love with Psyche.

Furious, Venus proceeds to persecute Psyche further before love and the intervention of the gods finally bring the star-crossed couple to happiness.

Along the walls of the loggia, the tale is told in a series of exuberant scenes in which the naked gods of antiquity cavort through fantastical garlands of vegetables, flowers, and some extremely suggestive fruits — pomegranates, squash, melons, bunches of grapes, a throbbing aubergine — that frame the scenes like the most extravagant natural trellis ever devised.

After Psyche overcomes the series of apparently impossible trials set her by the vindictive goddess of love all along the walls of the hall, the two massive central ceiling panels show the story’s triumphant resolution.

In one, Jupiter convenes a council of the gods and orders Venus to cease her persecution of Psyche. In the other — a sumptuous wedding banquet where gods and mortals feast side by side — Cupid and Psyche are finally married in the celestial realm.

The parallels with the impending wedding of Chigi and Francesca would have been unmistakable to every guest at the actual 1519 wedding banquet that was subsequently held in this very loggia.

The Villa’s upper floor contains two further extraordinary rooms.

The first, the Sala delle Prospettive (Room of Perspectives), was decorated by Peruzzi himself with a brilliant trompe-l’oeil fresco that appears to dissolve the room’s walls entirely — replacing them with a painted colonnade that opens onto sweeping panoramic views of Rome and the surrounding countryside. From within the room it is almost impossible to tell where the real architecture ends and the painted illusion begins.

It was here that Chigi and Francesca actually hosted their 1519 wedding banquet, in a space where the boundary between interior and exterior, between art and reality, had been artfully erased.

The splendid decorations continue upstairs, where in the appropriately named Room of the Perspective Views Peruzzi created a wonderful illusionistic decoration that appears to dissolve the walls of the room and create a fictional colonnade that leads on to peaceful country landscapes through a clever trick of perspective known as trompe-l’oeil. It was here that Chigi and Francesca actually celebrated their lavish wedding banquet in 1519.

Look closely at the walls of this room and you will also find something sobering: 16th-century graffiti scratched into the painted surface by the soldiers of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V during the catastrophic Sack of Rome in 1527, which followed the death of Chigi in 1520 by just seven years.

The fearsome landsknechts occupied the villa for over a year, and the inscription tells us plenty about their state of time during this dark time for the city.

The text reads: “”Was sol ich schreibenn und nit lachen, die lanzknecht haben den babst lauffen machen” – roughly translated into English, “Why should I write and not laugh; the Landsknechts have the Pope on the run.”

There is no clearer reminder of how quickly the golden world of the High Renaissance was extinguished, just a few short years after Raphael and his contemporaries completed one of its greatest testaments. And it’s not the only Landsknecht-penned graffiti carved into a Roman fresco – Raphael’s Disputa in the Vatican got the same treatment, with the “LUTHER” carved into the painting still visible today.

The adjacent bedchamber was decorated by the Sienese artist known as Il Sodoma with a massive fresco of the Wedding Night of Alexander the Great and Roxanne (c. 1511-12): the conqueror of the known world, still in his armour, hurries toward his new bride as she reclines on a canopied bed, surrounded by cheeky putti who tug at Alexander’s cloak and pull at his armour in their eagerness to hasten the union.

It is one of the most overtly erotic paintings of the 16th century — and for Chigi and Francesca, lounging in their own bed beneath this scene of martial desire transformed into love, the message could hardly have been clearer.