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Villa Farnesina
Mon-Sat 9am-1pm; L6000. Across the road from the Palazzo Corsini is the much more interesting Villa Farnesina, built during the primeval sixteenth century by Baldassare Peruzzi for the Renaissance banker Agostino Chigi and known for its Renaissance frescoes. Inside you can view the Raphael-designed painting of Cupid and Psyche in the now glassed-in loggia, completed in 1517 by the artist’s assistants, Giulio Romano, Francesco Penni and Giovanni da Udine. Vasari claims Raphael didn’t complete the work because his infatuation with his mistress - “La Fornarina”, whose father’s bakery was situated nearby - was making it difficult to concentrate, and says that Chigi arranged for her to live with the painter in the palace while he worked on the loggia. More likely he was simply so overloaded with commissions that he couldn’t possibly finish them all. He did, however, manage to finish the Galatea in the room next door, which he fitted in between his Vatican commissions for Julius II; “the greatest evocation of paganism of the Renaissance”, Kenneth Clark called it, although Vasari claims that Michelangelo, passing by one day while Raphael was canoodling with La Fornarina, finished the painting for him. In the same room, the lunettes feature scenes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses by Sebastiano del Piombo, while the ceiling illustrates Chigi’s horoscope constellations, frescoed by the architect of the building, Peruzzi, who also decorated the upstairs Salone delle Prospettive, where trompe l’oeil balconies give views onto contemporary Rome - one of the early examples of the technique.
