Palazzo Farnese, Rome
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- For other palaces with this name, see Palazzo Farnese (disambiguation).
Palazzo Farnese is a prominent High Renaissance palace in Rome, which currently houses the French Embassy in Italy.
"The most imposing Italian palace of the sixteenth century", according to Sir Banister Fletcher(1), this palace was designed by Antonio da Sangallo the Younger (1484-1546), one of Bramante's assistants in the design of St. Peter's. Construction began in 1517(1), commissioned by Alessandro Farnese, who had been appointed as a Cardinal in 1493 at age 25 (thanks to his sister, who was Pope Alexander VI Borgia's official mistress) and was living a princely lifestyle. When in 1534 he was made pope, as Paul III, he employed Michelangelo to complete the third story and revise the courtyard, as an emblematic "power house" suitable to the Farnese family. The massive facade dominates a small piazza; the memorable features of its facade are the alternating pediments that cap the windows of the piano nobile, the central rusticated portal and Michelangelo's projecting cornice. The central window Michelangelo revised when the cardinal became pope, adding an architrave to support the largest coat-of-arms with papal tiara Rome had ever seen. When Paul stepped to the balcony, the entire facade became a setting for his person. The courtyard, initially open arcades, is ringed by an academic exercise in ascending orders (Doric, Corinthian, and Ionic). The piano nobile was garlanded by Michelangelo.
The palazzo was redesigned in 1534 and 1541, modified under Michelangelo after Sangallo's death in 1546 onwards and completed by Giacomo della Porta in 1589. Several main rooms were frescoed with elaborate allegorical programs including a series of frescoes on Hercules, and The Loves of the Gods by Annibale Carracci and other artists, 1597-1608. For generations the room with Herculean frescoes (Sala d'Ercole) housed the famous sculpture from Greco-Roman antiquity known as the Farnese Hercules.
On the garden side, which faces the Tiber, Michelangelo proposed to give the palazzo's vast bulk some breathing room with a bridge to link the center of the garden facade with the Pope's villa, the Villa Farnesina on the Trastevere side. The open portico was completed in the end of the 16th century.
In Puccini's opera Tosca (1900), set in Napoleonic Rome, the heroine's confrontation with the malevolent Chief of Police, Scarpia, takes place in Palazzo Farnese. The Palazzo was inherited from the Farnese by the Bourbon kings of Naples, from whom the French government purchased it in 1874. Though the government of Mussolini ransomed it in 1936, the French Embassy remains, under a 99-year lease.
The Palazzo Farnese houses the great scholarly library amassed by the Ecole Française de Rome, concentrating especially on the archeology of Italy and medieval Papal history.
[edit] External links
- An illustrated architectural guide.
- Romeartlover site with 1765 print by Giuseppi Vasi
- Romeartlover entry for Farnese
- Satellite photo- The Palazzo Farnese is the massive, almost square, court-yarded structure in the center of the photo, to the North of the Tiber. The smaller bracket-shaped building southwest (lower) across the Tiber is the Villa Farnesina.
(1) Murray cites construction beginning in 1513.
[edit] Bibiliography
- Murray, Peter (1963). The Architecture of the Italian Renaissance. Schocken Books, New York, 158-164.