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.