It's Good to Be A Banker

The Villa Farnesina in Rome, Italy

Baldassare Peruzzi built this modestly sized but sumptuously decorated villa for banking mogul Agostino Chigi in 1508–11, who had particularly good taste in artists and hired Raphael, Sodoma, and Peruzzi to decorate the interior of his new villa.

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.

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 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 executed between 1510 and 1517 (restored in the 1990s) by Raphael’s students Giulio Romano, Raffaellino del Colle, and Francesco Penni.

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.

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." Raphel was buried in the Pantheon; Chigi, who died the same year, was buried in a chapel designed by Raphael in Santa Maria Novella.

In the grand Sala delle Prospettive upstairs, Peruzzi frescoed every inch of the walls to masterfully carry trompe l'oeil to its extremes and allow Chigi to glimpse an imagined outside world of Roman countryside and cityscapes between the painted marble columns of a (fake) open loggia.

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 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).

Via della Lungara 230
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