The Villa Farnesina
Palace of Venus in Renaissance Rome

This book restores the original vision of the beloved Villa Farnesina?a Palace of Venus celebrating aesthetic, social and erotic pleasure.

James Grantham Turner (Author)

9781316511015, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 6 October 2022

516 pages
28.6 x 22.3 x 3.5 cm, 2.03 kg

'… to recreate a largely vanished masterpiece of Renaissance architecture, painting and stucco in such detail, with diligent research fleshed out here and there by intelligent speculation and acute insight, is an achievement in itself. The Villa Farnesina is … a model of scholarly practice, lucidly written.' Keith Miller, The Times Literary Supplement

The frescoes of Peruzzi, Raphael and Sodoma still dazzle visitors to the Villa Farnesina, but they survive in a stripped-down environment bereft of its landscape, sealed so it cannot breathe. Turner takes you outside that box, restoring these canonical images to their original context, when each element joined in a productive conversation. He is the first to reconstruct the architect-painter Peruzzi's original, well-proportioned, well-appointed building and to re-visualize his lost façade decoration?erotic scenes and mythological figures who make it come alive and soar upward. More comprehensively than any previous scholar, he reintegrates painting, sculpture, architecture, garden design, topographical prints and drawings, archaeological discoveries and literature from the brilliant circle around the patron Agostino Chigi, the powerful banker who 'loved all virtuosi' and commissioned his villa-palazzo from the best talents in multiple arts. It can now be understood as a Palace of Venus, celebrating aesthetic, social and erotic pleasure.

Introduction
1. 'Antique' Imagination and the Creation of the Villa-Palazzo: Origins and Precursors
2. The Stanza del Fregio and Peruzzi's first architectural wall-painting
3. The Lost Façade-Paintings: 'Di terretta con storie di man sua, molto belle'
4. 1512 Overtures: The Villa, the Landscape Architecture and the Literature of Celebration
5. The Second Phase, 1518-1519: The 'Hall of Perspectives', the Nuptial Suite and the Loggia di Psiche.

Subject Areas: Residential buildings, domestic buildings [AMK], Architectural structure & design [AMC], Renaissance art [ACND], History of art & design styles: c 1400 to c 1600 [ACN]