Away from the center of Rome and across the Tiber River is the Villa Farnesina, a jewel box of Renaissance art hidden away in the brash neighborhood of Trastevere.
Named for the family who acquired it in the seventeenth century, the property was originally the home of the fabulously wealthy Sienese banker and mine owner Agostino Chigi (1466–1520), who commissioned Baldassare Peruzzi to design a base for his Rome operations that would be half city apartment, half country villa.
Chigi was uninterested in just buying panel paintings: he wanted the building’s interior to be the artwork itself. Its walls are decorated with several of the most celebrated works of Renaissance fresco, including Raphael’s Galatea (1512) and his Marriage of Cupid and Psyche cycle (1517), as well as Sodoma’s Wedding of Alexander and Roxane (ca. 1516), Sebastian del Piombo’s Polyphemus (ca. 1512), and Peruzzi’s ceiling representations of Chigi’s horoscope, including a picture of Medusa and her stoned victims, often read as a symbol of the magic powers of the artist.
Turning off one of Trastevere’s cobblestone streets, visitors enter the walled-in campus through a gigantic iron gate. A pebble-covered driveway leads to horse stables designed by Raphael on the one side and gardens that hosted many of Chigi’s parties on the other.
Empty now, the grounds were once covered by statues from antiquity, which were being eagerly dragged out of the rubble beneath the city. The late fifteenth century saw the rebirth of the old Rome, delivered by archeological hunters hired by Pope Julius II, whose hoard of findings now makes up the Vatican Rooms. Wealthy patrons like Chigi bought up the rest. But, not satisfied with merely owning the past, they also provided lodgings on their estates for painters like Raphael to apply Christian genius to their nostalgic pagan fantasies.
After presenting a ticket to the doorman, the visitor walks through a glass façade directly into the Loggia, which houses Raphael’s vibrant Cupid and Psyche, what the historian Jacob Burckhardt referred to as the “highest possible achievement,” the “summit” of the idealized nude. Two massive ceiling frescoes loom above: the council of the Olympian gods and the eponymous pair’s wedding feast. Here are the Greek deities, radiant, painted by the best; here is the Renaissance’s perfect physique, perfect health, perfect taste. The work, for many, serves as a permanent definition of “good art”: impossible richness packed into strict and elegant form, the tightening of a lifeforce to its maximum performance. It is sheer Reinheit—purity.
But for Burckhardt, Raphael was working with a disadvantage. The master only designed the work: it was carried out by his students Giulio Romano and Francesco Penni, who “rendered the ideas of the master in a conventional and even coarse style.” We can improve it by mentally imposing the “naturalistic” style of Galatea onto it, Burckhardt reckons. Additionally, there is the problem of the pendentives—the series of outgrowths and concavities crowning the ceiling. Burckhardt thought these were spatially “ill-adapted” for a narrative fresco featuring several figures. It is therefore all the more impressive that Raphael “brought forth therefrom opportunities of special beauty.”
The bordering frescoes mainly depict scenes from Apuleius’s second-century A.D. Neoplatonic satire The Golden Ass. Apuleius used the Cupid and Psyche myth as a centralizing force, gathering up all the other chapters of the story into its gravitational orbit. In his telling, the kidnapped Psyche is forced to quell Venus’s wrath by fulfilling quests around the universe, including a descent to the underworld for an elixir of Proserpina’s beauty, and Cupid must agree to make available his love-striking services to Zeus indefinitely before the lovers can be reunited—Raphael and his students brought the entire story marvelously to life. Interspersing these scenes are cherubim stealing Zeus’s thunderbolts, Poseidon’s trident, and the like, and each is bordered with flora and fruit painted by Giovanni da Udine, bursting forth as from superrich soil. When I visited there was an interactive touchscreen that analyzed each plant species, revealing that they can be sourced not only to Europe but also to Asia and the Americas.
Goethe said that of all the world’s galleries, the Farnesina was the most beautiful. The whole palace is a shrine to Venus, Cupid’s mother, calling on the future to overcome the fear of eros and embrace it. Everything is about fecundity, from the beautiful Galatea rising from the amniotic sea, to the wedding of Alexander and Roxane, to Peruzzi’s astrological work.
One recent account of the Farnesina, possibly the most exhaustive ever to be written in English, is James Grantham Turner’s The Villa Farnesina: Palace of Venus in Renaissance Rome (2022). He reconstructs the villa of Chigi’s time: there was an underground pool called the “Cave of the Nymphs” with a grotto on the Tiber; a tower above what is now the highest floor with a panoramic view of the city; and a system of steam baths and fireplaces throughout.
Turner takes eros, understood as sensual pleasure and desire, to be the villa’s skeleton key. “The power of Eros,” writes Turner, “has been the mastermistress theme of this entire book.” He concludes his work with the words amor surrexit omnia. Love conquers all. The Farnesina is indeed highly sensual, and has thus been reduced by many critics to a temple of hedonism. But this appraisal misses something vital: Chigi, even if he was driven by lust for gold, had the wisdom to spend his gold on beauty that cannot be consumed.
The marriage of Psyche (meaning “soul” in Greek) to Cupid (Cupido in Latin, meaning “passionate love;” in Greek, Eros) operates on both the fleshly and the ideal. Telling the story of two gods on their lustful pursuit, Apuleius was also teaching the dialectic journey of the soul on its way to comprehend and unify itself with its destination, love.
A similar love was practiced by titans of industry in better eras: the love of man, phil-anthropos, not as eros but as philia, friendly affection, and not restricted to socioeconomic alleviation. Man’s capacity for the ideal needs satiation and can be given it in the form of great aesthetic beauty. This is one reward of the “gift-giving virtue” that is the Herrsucht, lust to rule, possessed by the best.
And so the figure of Chigi the patron keeps returning to mind: none of this art would be possible without his alum mines in Tolfa—an alchemy of coal to diamond. One placard informed me that Chigi was influenced by Giovanni Pontano, a humanist advisor to the king of Naples, who wrote a series of texts exhorting wealthy men to donate to the arts. These tracts on “the social potential of money” rank cultural patronage higher than meddlesome social reforms. Improve man’s soul and its aesthetic faculties, and his will follows.
Today’s European aesthetes seem unable to lift a finger and risk disturbing their otium, while America’s ruling class can’t fathom the reason for such an “immaterial” investment. But Renaissance patrons like Chigi somehow managed to maintain a standard of cultural nobility while pursuing business. Their industriousness did not degrade the looks of their surroundings but served as the prerequisite of their transformation into poetry, whose major mode is glorification.
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Source: newcriterion.com
