The story
Upstairs in the Villa Farnesina in Rome, painted columns open onto painted views of the city, and the plaster is scratched with words in German. The graffiti were left by soldiers of the emperor Charles V, who sacked Rome in 1527, and one of them jokes that the mercenaries have put the pope to flight. The room, the Hall of Perspectives, was painted by Baldassarre Peruzzi, who had also designed the house.
The owner was Agostino Chigi, a banker from Siena and one of the richest men in Rome, who had the villa built beside the Tiber in the early 1500s and then hired the best painters he could find. On the ground floor, Raphael painted the sea nymph Galatea riding a shell drawn by dolphins, beside the one-eyed giant Polyphemus who loved her, painted by Sebastiano del Piombo, a young Venetian. In the garden loggia, Raphael and his workshop covered the vault with the story of Cupid and Psyche, framed by garlands of fruit and flowers by Giovanni da Udine. Upstairs again, Chigi's bedroom has Sodoma's fresco of the wedding of Alexander the Great and Roxana.
After Chigi died in 1520 his family's fortune declined, and later that century the villa was bought by Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, whose family name it still carries. Today it is the home of the Accademia dei Lincei, Italy's national academy of sciences, which opens it to visitors.
