This chapter examines the early evolution of Peruzzi’s own wall-painting and architectural decoration, including the St Helena Chapel in S. Croce in Gerusalemme, Rome, the Castello in Ostia, and the first of his frescoes for the Farnesina itself, in the Sala or Stanza del Fregio (‘the room of the frieze’). It will also review the influences studied in Chapter 1, from Peruzzi’s earliest work in Siena cathedral, comparing his innovations with those of Pinturicchio and the young Raphael. I see the Farnesina frieze as a pivotal work for Peruzzi, synthesising earlier study of antiquities (some close at hand) and looking forward to the more public astrological vault. Most observers stress the difference between these two projects, one intimate, animated and softly lit, the other bright, ‘cold and pale’, formal and stylised as befits its official function of proclaiming the patron’s destiny (n. 59 in this chapter). Here, in contrast, I will suggest affinities between them.

Peruzzi’s next figurative project after the Stanza del Fregio was to decorate the exterior of the new villa. This astonishingly ambitious design task involved not only the three-dimensional elements that still variegate the plain façade – austere pilasters and window-cases, topped by the spectacular cornicione or ‘great cornice’ with its acanthus brackets above a frieze of swags and putti moulded in stucco – but paintings that gave the illusion of sculptures and reliefs. The eyewitness Vasari, in the passage cited as my first epigraph, thought that the grace and natural beauty of Peruzzi’s architecture owed much to its being ‘adorned on the outside’ with storie or ‘histories’ by his own hand, some of them ‘molto belle’ (iv.318). We will see that Peruzzi himself called such narrative panels ‘Istorie’ and confronted the problem of ‘accommodating’ them to architecture.

Latin poems by Egidio Gallo and Blosio Palladio, set within a cluster of other verses, literary allusions and archival documents, let us grasp what might have been seen before the villa was complete, and how Chigi’s circle imagined his projected works. Using lost material brought to light in Chapter 3, plus legal records, visitors’ accounts of the building, overlooked details from sixteenth-century views of Rome, and neglected evidence still on the grounds, this chapter will correlate extant remains and poetic tributes, building an extensive picture of the estate as a multiplicity of buildings integrated into the landscape garden. Common themes unite painting, sculpture, architecture and topography. I recognise literary conventions and hyperboles, but I also argue for considerable insight and visual acuity in these authors; Blosio was so impressed that he later asked Peruzzi to design his own town house and the gardens of his ambitious villa, where he commissioned frescoes that echo the exterior paintings of the Farnesina – some of them still in situ (Figs. 4.1, 4.2).

Who needs another book on the Farnesina? No secular building typifies the Italian High Renaissance better than this villa established on the bank of the Tiber by the outrageously wealthy Papal banker Agostino Chigi (1466–1520). With its innovative architecture by Baldassare Peruzzi, brilliant frescoes by Peruzzi himself, Sebastiano del Piombo, Sodoma and Raphael – culminating in the tale of Psyche designed by Raphael and painted by his talented team of artists including Giulio Romano and Giovanni da Udine – it has been thoroughly studied and documented. Already in 1512, a French diplomat called it ‘the most beautiful and rich thing I have ever seen’, anticipating Goethe’s declaration that no more beautiful works of decorative art existed. Every survey of Renaissance art and every study of those individual artists includes a passage on the Farnesina (a nickname given long after the Farnese had bought the property, more correctly known as the Villa Chigi or ‘Palazzo Agostino Chigi’). Distinguished architects record it in their sketchbooks (Fig. I.1).

Most of the Farnesina’s canonical wall paintings – Peruzzi’s illusionistic salone or Sala delle Prospettive, Sodoma’s Roxana and Alexander in the nuptial bedroom, and the story of Psyche by Raphael and his team – are the product of a distinct second phase of remodelling and decoration, not conceived from the start but put in motion when Agostino Chigi decided, by marrying, to legitimise his concubine Francesca and their children (the firstborn, Alessandro, suggesting the theme of Alexander the Great). Together with Raphael’s Galatea these frescoes became the focus of future visitors, artists, connoisseurs and art historians for centuries. In this sense they need no introduction, or at least no elaborate reconstruction and exposition. This concluding chapter will emphasise aspects of these all-too-familiar painted rooms that are freshly illuminated by the discoveries made earlier in the book. The ‘new sensibility towards the natural world’ embodied in the loggias generated new ‘fictive landscapes’ (Ch. 4 n. 65). Venus myths initiated in Peruzzi’s external paintings and astrological vault, and further explored by the house poets, continue to influence these new developments later in the decade.

Hints for the genesis of the Farnesina may be found in ancient and Renaissance literature, in earlier projects commissioned by Agostino Chigi and his family, and in Peruzzi’s own development. This opening chapter traces the influences, ancient and modern, that converged to form the precocious architect-painter, within the larger context of Chigi patronage (in Siena and Rome) and the cultural ambitions that made Agostino distinctive. As Nicholas Adams remarks, ‘the villa is a compact encyclopedia of antique references and motifs on the theme of pleasure and fame’, Peruzzi being ‘an artist and architect of great erudition, without equal as a draughtsman and noted for his extraordinary studies of antique buildings’. Section 1 accordingly starts by characterising Peruzzi’s relation to Antiquity, showing how he augmented those studies with the precepts of Vitruvius and ancient accounts of the ‘voluptuous’ villa, notably those by the poet Statius. Elements from many sources combine to create a unique synthesis of villa, palace, office and theatre, already announced in the stage set of the entry façade (Fig. 1.1, an invaluable sixteenth-century architect’s drawing, now in New York).

“though I am not the only person in Sussex who reads Milton,” wrote Virginia Woolf in a famous diary entry of September 1918,