Description

Today, the Villa Farnesina is known for its impressive set of frescoes. These frescoes feature imagery of astrological time-telling symbolism, ancient mythology, precious materials, and pastoral landscapes. Diane Spencer suggests that some of the less ostentatious landscape-focused frescoes (particularly those along one corridor connecting the south wing to the loggia and the hemicycle on the ground floor), prime the visitor to take an semi-literal promenade and to "to look thoughtfully through the wall to the real villa's environs" (150).

A particularly interesting room for thinking about the relationship between the villa, frescoes, and imagined and real landscapes is the Sala delle Prospettive (The Room of Perspectives). Peruzzi himself painted this room between 1516 and 1518. In the Sala, marble floors blend seamlessly into wall frescoes of an imagined portico extended over an idealized, semi-pastoral, semi-antique, semi-late-medieval landscape of Rome, bordered on top by mythical scenes. Beyond the incredibly realistic marble columns and other faux-architectural structures, one can see Rome's countryside on the western wall (which faces western Rome's countryside) and a more built Rome on the eastern wall (which faces Rome's urban core across the river). Looking closely at the eastern wall, one can see features of medieval Rome -- campanili (bell towers), medieval houses, and churches -- in addition to the classical and pastoral features expected of Renaissance paintings of imagined landscapes. Oliver Grau describes this room and the almost subliminal experience it allowed its sixteenth-century visitor as the best Renaissance example of virtual reality, or the "idea of transposing the audience into an enclosed, illusionary visual space" (366).

Today, this room transposes its contemporary audience not just into an imagined classical and pastoral past, but also into an imagined late medieval and early Renaissance Rome. Through the fresco cycles and the actual windows looking out onto towers, campanili, the Aurelian Walls, and the villa's gardens, one can begin to imagine the Farnesina in its early modern landscape.

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Source

"Villa Farnesina." Reference document from the Villa Farnesina. Date of production unknown. Received May 16, 2015. http://www.romasegreta.it/trastevere/via-della-lungara.html

Grau, Oliver. "Into the Belly of the Image: Historical Aspects of Virtual Reality." Leonardo, Vol. 32, No. 5, Seventh New York Digital Salon (1999): 365-371.

Jones, Mark Wilson. "Palazzo Massimo and Baldassare Peruzzi's Approach to Architectural Design." Architectural History, Vol. 31 (1988): 59-106.

Spencer, Diana. "VI Spaces and Places." Greece &amp, Rome, suppl. Roman Landscapes: Culture and Identity 56.39 (Oct 2009): 135-171.

Quinlan-McGrath, Mary. "A Proposal for the Foundation Date of the Villa Farnesina." Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 49 (1986): 245-250.

Quinlan-McGrath, Mary. "The Villa Farnesina, Time-Telling Conventions and Renaissance Astrological Practice." Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 58 (1995): 52-71.

Geolocation