Baldassare Peruzzi - architect and painter

Pupil of Bramante who left mark on Rome

The portrait of Baldassare Peruzzi in
Giorgio Vasari's 1568 book Lives of the Most
 Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects

The architect and painter Baldassare Peruzzi, who trained under Donato Bramante and was a contemporary of Raphael, was born on this day in 1481 in a small town near Siena.

Peruzzi worked in his home city and in Rome, where he spent many years as one of the architects of the St Peter’s Basilica project but where he was also responsible for two outstanding buildings in his own right - the Villa Farnesina and the Palazzo Massimo alle Colonne.

The Villa Farnesina, a summer house commissioned by the Sienese banker Agostino Chigi in the Trastevere district, is unusual for its U-shaped floor plan, with a five-bay loggia between the arms.

Raphael and Sebastiano del Piombo were among those who helped decorate the villa with frescoes, but Peruzzi is acknowledged as the chief designer, possibly aided by Giuliano da Sangallo. He was relatively inexperienced at the time but was personally selected by Chigi despite the huge array of talent on offer in the city at the time.

Some of the frescoed paintings on the walls of the interior rooms are also by Peruzzi. One example is the Sala delle Prospettive, in which the walls are painted to create the illusion of standing in an open-air terrace, lined by pillars, looking out over a continuous landscape.

Peruzzi's brilliant Sala delle Prospettive, with its illusion
of an open-air terrace, inside the Villa Farnesina

Originally known as the Villa Chigi, the house in 1577 became the property of the Farnese family after whom it was renamed. Michelangelo at one time proposed linking the villa with Palazzo Farnese on the other side of the Tiber. The project was never completed, although there are remnants of a few arches still visible in the back of Palazzo Farnese.

The Palazzo Massimo alle Colonne on the present-day Corso Vittorio Emanuele II is still more unusual, featuring a curved facade, dictated by the shape of the foundations of the building that had previously stood on the site - destroyed during the 1527 Sack of Rome by mutinous troops of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V - which had owed their pattern to the semi-circular Odeon of Domitian, an ancient Roman theatre.

Commissioned by Pietro Massimo, descendent of one of the oldest noble families in Rome, the palace has an entrance characterised by a central portico with six Doric columns. Inside, a courtyard and a loggia feature more Doric columns, hence the palace’s name.

The monument to
Peruzzi at the Pantheon

Peruzzi, born in the town of Sovicille, about 10km (6 miles) southwest of Siena, began his career as a painter of frescoes in the Cappella San Giovanni in Siena’s cathedral. He moved to Rome in his 20s, receiving the commission for the Villa Farnesina in 1509.

With the death of Raphael, in 1520 he was appointed as one of the architects engaged on the massive programme to build a new St Peter’s Basilica.

However, he fled Rome following the events of 1527 and returned to Siena, where he was employed as architect to the Republic. He built new fortifications for the city, remodelled the Church of San Domenico and designed a remarkable dam on the Bruna river near Giuncarico.

From 1531 he was back in Rome and again working at St Peter's, where he was appointed the principal architect to the basilica in 1534.

Other works attributed to Peruzzi include a mosaic ceiling for the church of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, paintings in the churches of Sant'Onofrio and San Pietro in Montorio and in Santa Maria in Portico a Fontegiusta in Siena.

Peruzzi’s son, Giovanni Sallustio, was also an architect. Another son, Onorio, learned painting from his father but then became a Dominican priest in the convent of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva in Rome.

He died in Rome in January 1536, aged 54.

The Villa Farnesina is one of Baldassare Peruzzi's two
masterpieces from his time working in Rome

Travel tip:

The Villa Farnesina can be found on Via della Lungara in the Trastevere district of Rome.  After the Farnese family, the villa belonged to the Bourbons of Naples and in 1861 to the Spanish Ambassador in Rome, Bermudez de Castro, Duke of Ripalta. Today, it is owned by the Italian State and accommodates the Accademia dei Lincei, a long-standing academy of sciences. The main rooms of the villa, including the Loggia, are open to visitors from 9am to 2pm on Monday to Saturday, and on every second Sunday of the month from 9am to 5pm. For more details, visit http://www.villafarnesina.it

The beautiful Romanesque-Gothic
cathedral in Siena

Travel tip:

Siena’s Duomo - the Cathedral of St Mary of the Assumption - was designed and completed between 1215 and 1263 on the site of an earlier structure. It has a beautiful façade built in Tuscan Romanesque style using polychrome marble. There had been plans to build an enormous basilica, which would have been the largest in the world, but the idea was abandoned because of lack of funds due to war and the plague. Nonetheless, the cathedral built in its place to plans drawn up by Giovanni di Agostino, with a pulpit designed by Nicola Pisani, is considered a masterpiece of Italian Romanesque-Gothic architecture.

Siena hotels from Booking.com


More reading:

Raphael, the precocious genius who became one of the Renaissance greats

How Agostino Chigi became one of Europe's richest men

The mutinous army that laid waste to Rome

Also on this day:

1274: The death of the philosopher Saint Thomas Aquinas

1678: The birth of Turin architect Filippo Juvarra

1785: The birth of novelist Alessandro Manzoni

Selected books:

Giorgio Vasari's The Lives of the Artists (Oxford World's Classics)

(Picture credits: Peruzzi monument by cmholm;Villa Farnesina by Jean-Pierre Dalbéra; Siena cathedral by Myrabella; all via Wikimedia Commons)


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Agostino Chigi - banker and arts patron

Nobleman from Siena became one of Europe’s richest men

A Roman coin bearing the image of Agostino Chigi,
who was one of the 16th century's richest bankers

The banker Agostino Chigi, who was a major sponsor of artists during the Renaissance, was born on this day in 1466 in Siena.

At its height, Chigi’s banking house in Rome was the biggest financial institution in Europe, employing up to 20,000 people, with branches throughout Italy and abroad, as far apart as London and Cairo.

Chigi invested a good deal of his wealth in supporting the arts, notably providing financial backing to almost all the main figures of the early 16th century, including Perugino, Sebastiano del Piombo, Giovanni da Udine, Giulio Romano, Il Sodoma (Giovanni Bazzi) and Raphael.

Perugino painted The Chigi Altarpiece, dated at around 1506-1507, which hangs in the Chigi family chapel in the church of Sant'Agostino in Siena. 

Chigi’s significant legacy to Rome was to have built a chapel in the church of Santa Maria della Pace, another - his mortuary chapel, the Chigi Chapel - in the church of Santa Maria del Popolo, and the superb suburban villa in Trastevere, on the banks of the Tiber, which since 1579 has been known as the Villa Farnesina. 

The altarpiece painted by Perugino
for Agostino Chigi in Siena

Agostino Chigi was the son of the prominent Sienese banker Mariano Chigi, from an ancient and illustrious Tuscan family. He moved to Rome around 1487, taking with him a rich fund of capital.

He grew the wealth of his own bank by lending considerable sums to Pope Alexander VI and others, and by diversifying from regular banking practice by buying monopoly control of salt mining in the Papal States and the Kingdom of Naples, as well as that of alum, a mineral used in the textile industry.

After the death of the Borgia pope Alexander VI and his short-lived Sienese successor Pius III Piccolomini, Chigi helped Pope Julius II, in return for which he became treasurer and notary of the Apostolic Camera.  Agostino even accompanied Julius in the field in his military campaigns and went to Venice on his behalf to buy Venetian support for the papal forces in the War of the League of Cambrai.

Work began on his magnificent palace in Trastevere in 1506. Chigi took the unusual step of commissioning an untried pupil of Bramante, Baldassare Peruzzi, to design and oversee the construction of the villa, although he may have been helped Giuliano da Sangallo, the favored architect of Lorenzo de' Medici.

Raphael's fresco The Triumph of Galatea.
in the loggia at the Villa Farnesina

His design differed from that of the typical urban palazzo, which tended to be rectangular, with an enclosed courtyard. This villa, intended as an airy summer pavilion, had a U-shaped plan with a five-bay loggia between the arms, facing north, which was the main entrance.

The best known element of the sumptuous decorations are Raphael's frescoes on the ground floor, both in the loggia depicting the classical and secular myths of Cupid and Psyche, and in the east-facing loggia, depicting The Triumph of Galatea. 

This was a mythological scene from an intended series inspired by the Stanze per la giostra of the Florentine poet Angelo Poliziano. It shows the near-naked sea nymph Galatea on a shell-shaped chariot drawn by two dolphins, surrounded by other sea creatures.

It has been noted that Raphael’s Galatea bore similarities to the courtesan, Imperia Cognati, who was Agostino Chigi's lover and is said to have posed for Raphael on more than one occasion. The art historian and Raphael's near-contemporary, Giorgio Vasari, noted, however, that Raphael had said that Galatea was the product of his imagination, an idealised beauty.

It was at this villa that Chigi held sumptuous banquets. He was recognised as the richest man in Rome but was said to have affected a contempt of money by throwing silver dishes into the Tiber at the end of the parties, although it is thought his servants were on hand to collect them in nets draped under the windows.

The villa was called the Viridario in Chigi's time. It became the property of the Farnese family in 1577, more than a half-century after his death.

The Palazzo Chigi, the current official residence of Italian prime ministers, was bought by Fabio Chigi, related to Agostino as a descendent of his father’s brother, shortly after he became Pope Alexander VII in 1655.

The northern aspect of the Villa Farnesina, which was
Agostino Chigi's summer palace in Rome

Travel tip:

The Villa Farnesina can be found on Via della Lungara in the Trastevere district of Rome.  After the Farnese family, the villa belonged to the Bourbons of Naples and in 1861 to the Spanish Ambassador in Rome, Bermudez de Castro, Duke of Ripalta. Today, it is owned by the Italian State and accommodates the Accademia dei Lincei, a long-standing academy of sciences. The main rooms of the villa, including the Loggia, are open to visitors from 9am to 2pm on Monday to Saturday, and on every second Sunday of the month from 9am to 5pm. For more details, visit http://www.villafarnesina.it

The Palazzo Chigi in Rome was built originally for the
Aldobrandini family before passing to the Chigi family in 1659

Travel tip:

The 16th-century Palazzo Chigi, which overlooks the Piazza Colonna and the Via del Corso in Rome, was begun in 1562 by Giacomo della Porta and completed by Carlo Maderno in 1580 for the Aldobrandini family. It was in the ownership of the Chigi family, who had it remodelled by Felice della Greca and Giovan Battista Contini, from 1659 until the 19th century. It became the residence of the Austro-Hungarian Ambassador to Italy in 1878 before being bought by the Italian state in 1916, when it became the home of the Minister for Colonial Affairs. Later it was the official residence of the Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs and in 1961 became the official meeting place of Council of Ministers, whose president is the head of the Italian government - the prime minister - and can now use the palace as his official residence.


More reading:

Raphael: The precocious genius from Urbino

How the courtesan Imperia Cognati became a 16th century celebrity

Pope Alexander VI - the scheming Borgia pope

Also on this day:

1463: The birth of antiquities collector Andrea della Valle

1797: The birth of composer Donizetti

1850: The birth of Agostino Richelmy, the cardinal who fought with Garibaldi

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