Baldassare Peruzzi

Baldassare Peruzzi was both a painter and an architect, and his best-known room is a trick played with both skills at once. In the Villa Farnesina in Rome, built for a fabulously rich banker, he frescoed a hall so that painted marble columns seem to open onto a real view of the city and countryside beyond, a whole illusionary loggia on a flat wall.

He was Sienese by birth, drawn to Rome in the great years of Bramante, Raphael and Michelangelo, and he moved in that circle, absorbing its command of perspective. After Raphael died, Peruzzi worked as one of the architects of the new Saint Peter's basilica and designed palaces admired for their invention.

The Sack of Rome in 1527, when the emperor's troops looted the city, was a disaster for him. He was captured, robbed, and fled back to Siena poorer than before. He returned to Rome and kept working, but died in 1536 far from wealthy, respected more by fellow artists than rewarded by patrons.