The story
Step into the Sala dei Giganti and the walls seem to fall in on you. Giulio Romano, the painter and architect trained in Raphael's workshop, covered the room from the floor to the vault so that no frame or corner gives the eye a place to rest. Columns and boulders tumble onto the giants who tried to storm Olympus, while Jupiter hurls thunderbolts from the clouds above.
Giulio built the palace from 1524 into the mid-1530s for Federico II Gonzaga, ruler of Mantua, on a meadow island just outside the city where the family kept its famous horses. It was a house for pleasure and for receiving guests, and the Emperor Charles V was entertained here in 1530, the year he raised Federico to the rank of duke. The Gonzaga horses themselves stand life-size on the walls of the Sala dei Cavalli.
In the Sala di Amore e Psiche the theme turns to love. The walls show the wedding banquet of Cupid and Psyche crowded with gods, and one scene shows Venus and Mars bathing together. Another has Jupiter, in the shape of a serpent, seducing Olympias, the mother of Alexander the Great.
Today the palace is a civic museum, and among its paintings hangs Titian's portrait of Giulio himself, holding up the plan of a building.
