The Villa Farnesina in Rome, built in the early six¬teenth century for the rich sienese banker Agostino Chigi and now owned by the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, is one of the noblest and most harmonious creations of the Italian Renaissance. It is a masterpiece in which architectural design and pictorial decoration fuse in¬to a single marvellous synthesis. The sober volumet¬ric and spatial layout of the Villa, devised by the architect Baldassarre Peruzzi, is indeed the per¬fect setting for its rich interior decoration, boasting frescos by great masters such as Raphael, Sebastiano del Piombo, Giovanni Antonio Bazzi known as Sodoma, and Peruzzi himself.
After a somewhat troubled history and many changes of ownership, the Villa now bears the name and preserves the memory of the Farnese family, who acquired it in 1579 in violation of the binding legal conditions imposed by its original owner. It should re¬ally have been named after Agostino Chigi, the high¬ly ambitious patron and art-lover who was born in Siena in 1466 and who commissioned the Villa as the tangible sign of his own personality and high culture, decorating it magnificently and living in it until his death in 1520. Agostino came from a family of mer¬chants who became bankers. After receiving train¬ing in his father’s bank, he soon became familiar with the finances of the Papal States and at just twenty years old, he founded his first company in Rome. With the election of the Borgia pope Alexander VI in 1492, business increased for the sienese bankers, and Agostino’s affairs prospered so well that within a short time he was lending huge sums of money to Cesare Borgia, Piero de’ Medici, Guidobaldo da Montefeltro and even to the French king Charles VIII. However the real ba¬sis of his immense fortune came from the rights he owned to the alum mines of Tolfa near Rome. By rationalising and nurturing the extraction and sale of this valuable mineral salt, which was indispensable for the dyeing of fabrics, Agostino became the pos¬sessor of a flourishing international monopoly with his own fleet, anchored at Porto Ercole. After the very brief pontificate of Pius III Tode¬schini Piccolomini, his business relations with Julius II della Rovere were no less profitable. He assisted in Julius II’s election, and apart from financial matters, the two were quite attached by a shared love for art, literature, theatre and the an¬cient world. In 1509 Julius II accepted him into the papal familia and allowed the Chigi arms (six hills crowned with a star) to be charged with the Della Rovere oak. The rich banker also managed to ingratiate himself with the next pope, Leo X Medici, by organising feasts and lending sums of money.
Before moving into the Far¬nesina, Agostino Chigi lived in a house in Via dei Banchi with his young wife Margherita Saracini, who died childless in 1508. He then embarked on an affair with the courtesan Imperia, famous for her beauty and culture, who bore him a daughter, Lucrezia. But even before the death of Imperia in 1511 he had begun to court Margherita Gonzaga, the natural daughter of Francesco Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua; he failed to pull this marriage off however, even though he had promised to give up all his business interests so as to appease the prejudices of the Mantuan court. In 1511, on a debt-collecting mission to Venice, he met a young girl of humble origins, Francesca Ordeaschi, and lived with her as her common-law husband until 1519. In that year on the feast of St Augustine, no doubt prompted by a sense his own mortality, he decided to regularise his position with a proper wedding and at the same time dictated his Will.
The wedding banquet was a memorable event, but no less sumptuous were the many feasts that Agosti¬no gave, especially in the last years of his life, when he welcomed into his new home the foremost per¬sonalities of the age: poets, princes, cardinals, even the pope himself. The chroniclers record for exam¬ple that in 1518, on the occasion of the christening of the eldest child Lorenzo Leone, gold and silver vessels used for the banquet were flung into the Tiber as a sign of munificence (though it appears that the wily banker had ordered nets to be laid on the river bed so that the valuable objects could be recovered the next day). After its acquisition by Cardinal Alessandro Farnese the Younger, and after the death of his nephew Odoardo who inherited it, the Villa was abandoned, being occasionally lent to important vis¬itors to Rome such as Cardinal Richelieu, Cardinal Frederick of Assia-Darmstadt, Queen Christina of Sweden and various ambassadors of Louis XIV. In 1735 the Villa was bequeathed by Elisabetta Farnese to Carlo IV, King of the Two Sicilies, and became the residence of various Neapolitan ambassadors until Francesco II of Naples, having retired to Rome after his abdication, granted a 99-year lease on the Far¬nesina to the Spanish ambassador of Naples, Sal¬vador Bermudez de Castro, the duke of Ripalta. Finally the Villa was acquired in 1927 by the State, which used it to house the Italian Academy and in 1944 gave it to the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, housed in the nearby Palazzo Corsini. http://www.villafarnesina.it/?page_id=47&lang=en